‘Barry,’ ‘Jackie,’ And The Myths Of Personas
If you have no interest in the person who the film is about, biopics will always have a much harder task in entertaining its audience. Nevertheless, the art form continues to draw audiences who would otherwise never know about certain icons. How filmmakers continue to do this is often based on some mythical compilation of scenes that may or may not have happened. It is in those stretches of imagination that film audiences often discover the entertainment value. Or in some cases, the lack thereof.
This awards season brought two separate biopics based in some truth and fiction about the highest offices of the United States. Jackie, starring Natalie Portman and Barry, starring Devon Terrell, takes us into the lives of people who have in real life already made their marks on American History as the widow of a president assassinated on TV and the first Black man to take the oval office. While “Jackie” is focused on three highlights of Jackie Kennedy’s life in the office, “Barry” gives us Obama before he was even interested in running for office.
While there are many similarities between Barry and Jackie, both films have different approaches in the magnifying glasses they hold up to the figures they portray. While Barry attempts to show clearly all the possibilities — the people, the place, and times — that lead Obama to the White House, Jackie is more concerned with mirroring the obscurity that Jackie Onassis is still shrouded in due to her long held desire to control her and her husband’s image in history.
In similar ways, Barry and Jackie provide no singular answers for the choices they made in times of turbulence. Barry, however, does give the audience plenty of situations and moments across Obama’s life at Columbia to begin the conversation. Throughout Barry there is a questioning of both his racial identities, and even his generational and political identities. The entire picture of what could have made Obama the president he eventually became is investigated through his friends, his college experiences, and his thoughts about politics. Most importantly however, Barry gives the audience a deep exploration of the internal life of the man who was from literally everywhere and nowhere.
From the very beginning, duality is explored as a vital motif throughout the film. It balances showing Barry experiencing the Black community and holds it up against the various parts of the White community of Columbia University. There’s the extreme of the Black Jewish movement when they antagonize a White woman and there’s the close community of his Black male friends that play basketball with him and invite him to parties in their public housing projects. These scenes are then held up against the Columbia University security guard who continues to never know who Barry is and always questions his presence at the school, along with Barry’s romantic relationship with Charlotte, a White classmate who is well-meaning but just cannot fully understand. Ultimately, this myriad of situations gives a complexity to Barry that leaves the audience feeling closer to perhaps a deeply divisive and misunderstood public figure.
Meanwhile, Jackie is a descension into the grief and madness of a woman who may have scammed an entire nation. Barry is interested in the complexity and understanding of Barack Obama, while Jackie is interested instead of the smoke and mirrors that come with creating a legacy. The style of the film immediately lends itself to this idea with its haunting score in the background of even the bright spots in the film. The film dances back and forth in time, focusing on three moments in life, notably after she had married Kennedy and entered the White House. The mystery of Jackie’s origins before she was in the public eye serves the magic of Jackie’s various masks that she puts on to control national perception. As Ira Madison the III of MTV News notes, “Knowing their motivations strips away the myth — it makes them human; it keeps them from being larger than life.”
This focus on Jackie’s attempts to make a martyr out of Kennedy, a man who had been politically divisive and heavily criticized before his death, makes Jackie a much different kind of biopic than Barry. We’re supposed to feel empathy and understanding for Barry’s struggle to find his place in the world. Jackie, however, is not interested in creating another myth of a person. It is instead interested in an exposure that calls into question the popular perception that the nation had for the first modern Widow. Did she deserve the attention and national empathy when she had seemingly directly aimed to draw out those feelings by making parallels with President Lincoln and Camelot? Was Kennedy really the champion of Civil Rights that Jackie often argued he was?
It is no wonder then that one of the most resonating lines of Jackie is when she tells the journalist from Time, played by Billy Crudup, that “people like to believe in fairy tales.” Perhaps the brilliance of Jackie is the way in which you can never be sure if the film is a fairy tale of a woman broken by grief in the public and intrusive eye, or a nightmare in which political figures continue to manipulate our perception of reality.
Barry and Jackie never dive deep into the political careers of their respective political figures, but each film has a different relationship entirely with politics as a concept. Barry is as hopeful as some of Barack Obama’s most famous speeches. Meanwhile, Jackie gives you a choice of whether to buy into the marketing of politics or to uncomfortably accept that lies and secrets will always lurk in the halls of the Oval Office.
Biopics have the considerably dangerous ability to create truths where there was previously none. The audience may never know if Barack Obama was exactly as he appeared to be in Barry — lost in his multiple identities but ultimately optimistic and aware somewhat of his inner desire to enact change. We may never know if Jackie Kennedy was as unhinged as she seemed to be upon planning the extravagant funeral procession against Secret Service recommendations. Both films underline the continued reconciliation a fascinated audience must make about those who enter the White House:
Are they really who they say they are?
More importantly, do we really know a single shred of truth about anyone anyway?
