We’re still on a bit of a documentary jag in our house – and there’s been quite a good run on Sky Documentaries recently – I just need to remember to check through their listings and set the TiVo to record. I Am Jackie O was one we stumbled across a few weeks back – and I’ve been saving this to post until after the JFK-adjacent Recommendsday post.
If you don’t want to read a biography of Jackie O or don’t know that much about her, this will do that for you. And you’ve read any/some/many of the books I mentioned in the Recommendsday post, it has archive footage of all of the key moments that you’ve read about, plus home movie footage as well as talking heads and archive soundbites of the key figures at the time. A lot of Kennedy related documentaries are either wildly sychophantic or deep into the gossip (that’s if they’re not swimming in conspiracy theories) but this manages to dodge that a strikes a nice balance between examining the facts and looking at motivations. It’s not groundbreaking or revelatory, but it is a fairly even handed look at Jackie’s life. There’s obviously a fair bit of death – and images of those deaths – but I think you expect that when you’re going into a documentary about the wife of an assassinated president – whose family have had a lot of tragedy around them.
It’s not necessarily a doc to go out and buy – but if you’re interested in the subject, stick a bookmark on it on your platforms of choice to record it when it comes around again. It’s still fairly new, so you can rent it on various platforms at the moment, but I don’t think it’s outside the realms of possibility that it will be free on one of the streaming platforms at some point in the future.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 