Mica Levi - Jackie OST

A Closer Listen

Mica Levi first came to prominence in the occasionally punky, often arty, and sometimes shambolic Micachu And The Shapes.  She was not the obvious choice to compose the score to Jonathan Glazer’s stylistic sci-fi movie Under The Skin. But there was clearly more to Mica than her Shapes, and she proved herself with that score; her music is an integral part of the film’s power. Levi’s contribution clearly had an impact on Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who chose her to compose the music for his first American movie, Jackie. Perhaps he drew parallels between the two main characters, Scarlet Johansson’s alien and Natalie Portman’s First Lady: strong women who feel isolated among a changing canvas of men. In each instance, Levi’s score does more than set scenes; it delves deep into characterization.

The score works remarkably well as a stand-alone piece, and the titles offer enough information for the listener to piece together the film’s narrative. The sequence “Car” / “Tears” / “Autopsy” / “Empty” is quietly devastating. In short pieces such as these, Levi uses a small ensemble built principally around strings, subtly pulling at the heart.  For the most part, the pacing is understandably funereal.  A few recurring themes, many featuring slow cello, contribute to the melancholy.

Some occasional guest instruments each capture a particular mood.  “Graveyard”s military drum is self-explanatory, and the closest we get to a soundtrack cliché. The flute on “Vanity”, however, has a profound impact, giving the impression of a trapped butterfly dancing against a window, beautiful yet mournful. That phrase is probably the best description of Jackie Kennedy in this film, and the music best suited to capture and echo her emotions. Portman’s performance is likely to stir deep emotion in audiences who have might regarded her more as the remote ‘Jackie O’ than as a person suffering trauma, loss and grief. Mica Levi’s score can only enhance the cinematic experience. (Jeremy Bye)

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The Quietus

“There will never be another Camelot,” declares Jackie Kennedy with unbearable pomp towards the end of Pablo Larraín’s recent film. She’s referring to – and already mythologising - her late husband’s presidential team. Hard to dispute her claim on the basis of today’s cabinet of horrors, but it’s a particularly cloying moment in a film whose score by Mica Levi – ambivalent and rich in reference points – turns out to be its saving grace.

We hear before we see in Jackie: a downward-swooping major chord whose smeared trajectory recalls Levi’s main theme for 2014’s Under The Skin. It’s a technique that’s rapidly become her trademark, symbolic of cinema’s revived penchant for mid-century Polish sonorists like Krysztof Penderecki. But there’s far more going on here – as in Under The Skin - than the mining of 1950s modernism. Levi’s music has a brazenly homemade quality, from the earlier Micachu & The Shapes records to last year’s collaboration with Oliver Coates. Often her use of silence and fragmentation is almost dub-like, but here it re-orients emotional expectations superbly as Jackie struggles with the shock of her husband’s assassination. In ‘Empty White House’, stately classical motifs die away with a compelling abruptness. The performances, seemingly close-miked to capture every bow-scrape and key-click, only sharpen the vivid sense of human imperfection.

This was never going to be a repeat of Under The Skin’s trippy chemical rush. Even if the two films share complex, isolated female characters as their focus, the settings could hardly be more different: where Under The Skin imagined contemporary Glasgow as stalked by the supernatural, Jackie’s is the suffocating world of the White House, its corridors of power and spaces of prestige. It’s also the world of affluent white America in the Kennedy years, and Levi’s soundtrack is surely haunted by the conservative musics of the time: the tune heard in ‘Vanity’ unfurls like a fossilized cool-era jazz solo, brittle and forlorn, while the palette throughout has shades of the square, saccharine Brill Building sound that dominated the early 1960s – jaunty flutes, airy strings, flecks of tambourine – before the rowdy arrival of the Beatles and the glory years of Motown.

Jackie deals with a political culture fixated on image management, and much of the music registers this play of surfaces. ‘Children’, in particular, is a strange carousel of appearances: notes hang and recede with an almost MIDI-like coldness, somehow accumulating all the old-school suspense of a Bernard Herrmann Hitchcock score. The deeper resonance, meanwhile, is with the asymmetric constructions of Morton Feldman – patterns that circulate but never quite repeat.

Ultimately, Levi’s music only just cuts through the problems of the film. Yes Larraín is right to ask that we empathise with Jackie’s loss on a personal level, but he demands this as part of a wider package: that we mourn the loss of a ‘great man’, the leading light of a group of ‘ordinary men banding together to fight for a better world’. The film never really challenges the absurd myth-making that Jackie helped initiate, and that soon made JFK an infallible totem for American righteousness. The last part of the score, sweeping over the final scenes with uncharacteristic grandeur, seems to yield to the spin.

Still, there’s no doubt that the soundtrack deserves an Oscar later this month. It’s been widely noted that Levi is the first woman in twenty years to be nominated for Best Score, but that she should win has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with the off-modern freshness of her approach in a field dogged by generic bombast and minimalism-by-numbers.

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In director Pablo Larrain’s Jackie, unlike almost any movie made about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there are no hints of shadowy puppet masters or boogeymen: there is simply the spotlight on one person’s grieving, complicated by the grief of an entire nation. Accompanying the film is a score written by Mica Levi, whose work in film in the last three years is slowly surpassing any of her output as an experimental producer or art-pop rocker (with Micachu and the Shapes). Her score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin proved Levi’s ability to create sound that is not only atmospheric, but definitive to the film itself. With the power of an orchestra behind her, Levi provides Jackie a palpitating pulse for the film’s portrait of a seemingly unknowable historical figure.

The score introduces itself in the film immediately as Natalie Portman walks through autumnal grounds of the Kennedy compound. She is walking towards her home, to meet a reporter (Theodore H. White, who wrote a LIFE magazine article that largely began the Camelot myth surrounding the Kennedy administration) to discuss life after November 22. The camera zooms in on Portman’s grimace, as she makes her way home, and Levi’s “Intro,” swoops into the scene with ghostly strings, immediately setting a tone of melancholy. Throughout the film, Levi’s score is used sparingly, but with sensitive accuracy. Here in these first few minutes of the film, it gives weight to all the dead foliage.

The camera often lingers on Portman’s face, especially when she is looking in the mirror. In moments like these, Levi’s score emerges unexpectedly, giving a strange stability to these often frayed and vulnerable visual experiences. One moment in particular haunted me. Shortly after the assassination, Portman finds herself in the bathroom of Air Force One, right before LBJ is sworn in as president. She looks in the mirror, wiping away blood from her face and blouse. When Portman cleans the viscera off the mirror, smudging its surface and blurring away her image, the piece “Tears,” which was barely perceptible as a nervous string arrangement at the beginning of the scene asserts itself. A simple chord progression of keys gives a momentary balm, and frames the scene perfectly. Jackie is replete with visual moments like this one, that are painful to look at. What Levi’s music can do is provide a brief respite, smoothing the razor edges of a picture. And unlike her work in Under the Skin, Levi’s score in Jackie is unobtrusive, it exists when you need and want it to, providing either a relief from or a multiplication of the grief the film is relating.

Listening to the whole score removed from the film, it’s easy to spot the same sounds used over and over again. At times, these leitmotifs can seem uninteresting when stretched out into compositions. But when you revisit them, there is a puncturing sensation to these repetitions. One theme in particular: a swell of descending strings that mimic the action of exhaling a very deep breath, is quite affecting. It appears in the introductory song, as well as in “Lee Harvey Oswald” (a piece used during the assassination scene) and “Walk to the Capitol” (which that soundtracks the funeral procession). In these parts of the film, the regular reaction might be to hold your breath, while processing the overwhelming sadness. But, what Levi’s score can do, is give the film and the viewer a way to stabilize a reaction; the strings allow you to feel oxygen in the room.

As a piece of music alone, it is hard to separate Levi’s compositions from their pragmatic function as a score. When revisiting the score weeks after watching the movie, the effect of certain sounds and movements was apparitional, the film’s power lingering essentially because Levi’s sonic cues were so well-wrought. Without her work the film might be less complete. Like an solid frame to a complex painting, Levi’s score concretizes and helps control the artistic experience of the film. In effect, the score may not supersede its filmic anchor, but is sure does make the entire endeavor more beautiful.