Ronan Farrow: Right about Natalie Portman?

Natalie Portman emoting.

Something else was in Ronan Farrow's book---repeated attacks on the movie Jackie, the script to which was written by NBC News president Noah Oppenheim.

Ronan suggests that Oppenheim blocked him from exposing Harvey Weinstein's crimes because it would hurt his budding career as screenwriter. Jackie starred Natalie Portman as JFK's widow.

According to someone called Hunter Harris on Vulture:

Some people...believe that Jackie is an impressive work of art. Other people — apparently, David Remnick, Mia Farrow, Ronan Farrow, and also my best friend Molly — do not feel this way. Observe these excerpts from Catch and Kill, where Ronan Farrow refers to Jackie as a “morose biopic” that “featured a lot of dialogue-free long shots of the woman in question pacing around with tear-streaked mascara.” Objectively, these observations are correct. Subjectively, however, this is what makes Jackie great.

This reference to Natalie Portman's dialog-free sequences reminded me of Dana Stevens' comments about Portman on Slate:

I've never believed her in a single role. She evokes no emotional response in me beyond, "Oh, there's Natalie Portman." She doesn't overact or underact; she just stands around with whatever the appropriate expression for the scene seems to be on her sweet, pretty, childlike face. If there's something going on behind that face, I neither know nor care what it is, which means that long stretches of Brothers involving her character's interiority struck me as dramatically inert. If you possess the gene that enables Portman-caring, you may find them brilliant. [emphasis added]

Someone pointed out that Ronan Farrow had a few other reasons to be mad at NBC News. He had a show on MSNBC. His Mom kept tweeting about it. It was abruptly canceled.

After that, people spotted Farrow on another NBC News show. The show had the anchors sitting with the newsroom as a background and you could see Ronan Farrow sitting at his desk all day presumably playing computer solitaire. After a while, he got up to go to the bathroom. He had been made an object of both pity and ridicule.