Natalie Portman, the Jerusalem-born, Oscar-winning actress, is one of the brightest lights in Hollywood, and she is the subject of a tribute at the Jerusalem Cinematheque, which will be showing some of her best-loved films throughout the month.
Her latest film, Todd Haynes’s May December, will be shown several times and is still playing in theaters throughout the country. Portman portrays an actress researching a role in a movie about a woman who had sex with a seventh grader and later married him. Portman and Julianne Moore, who plays the woman, are expected to be nominated for Academy Awards; both already have Golden Globe nods.
The movie for which Portman won her Oscar, Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, is also part of the program, and she stars as a ballet dancer who begins to lose her grip on reality. While this is one of her best roles, you might also want to check out one of her underappreciated performances, as the mother in an adaptation of Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness.
Portman wrote the screenplay and directed this Hebrew-language movie, which was filmed on location all over Jerusalem. Although many Oz devotees felt it didn’t capture the complexity of the book, I thought it was true to the essence of Oz’s work, and she was haunting and brilliant as Oz’s troubled mother.
If she had gone the commercial route and made the film in English, more people would have seen it and she likely would have received the acclaim she deserved, but the movie wouldn’t have been as compelling.
Other movies in the series include Mike Nichols’s Closer, an adaptation of a play about love and hostility between men and women in contemporary London, which also starred Jude Law, Clive Owen, and Julia Roberts. Garden State is an enjoyable, low-key comedy/drama directed by and starring Zach Braff. Jim Sheridan’s Brothers featured Portman as the wife of a Marine who goes missing while on a tour of duty, and co-stars Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal.
Portman has also appeared in action movies. In her debut film, Luc Besson’s Leon, she played a girl who bonded with a hitman after her family was killed.
Based on a graphic novel, James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta features Portman as a woman captured by a totalitarian regime who is saved by an anti-government vigilante.
Other titles in the series include some of her less-compelling films, such as Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, a ponderous look at a traumatized singer, and Pablo Larrain’s lackluster Jackie, in which she nevertheless gave an excellent performance as first lady Jackie Kennedy.
For more details, go to https://jer-cin.org.il