Hilary and Jackie (1998)
Directed by Anand Tucker
Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce

That established, I should say that my great disappointment with the film has as much to do with my expectations for it as for its shortcomings in and of themselves. The film is deeply flawed and in many places incoherent, although even so I would say it is worth seeing, if only for the story it portrays (awkwardly).

Jacqueline du Pré, for those who do not know, was an English cellist whose passion for and deep understanding for music made her one of the greatest performers in the history of the instrument—and utterly incapable of normal social interaction.

A classical music superstar in the 60s, Jackie enjoyed tremendous acclaim and a well-publicized romance and marriage to pianist Daniel Barenboim. Her career was cut short when she was diagnosed with MS, forcing her to give up the one thing she was able to do well, and gradually robbing her of even simple speech.

Hilary and Jackie does not purport to be a biopic, but rather to explore the complicated relationship Jackie shared with her older sister Hilary, whose own promising musical talent became overshadowed by Jackie's in their early teens.

Hilary's book (A Genius in the Family, written with their brother Piers) is a very painful account of the difficulty of their relationship, from the early musical rivalry to the ultimate pain of caring for Jackie when she was ill. Having gone into the film with a fair amount of knowledge of the facts, I couldn't help noticing the convenient restructuring the filmmakers have given the story, adding dramatic parallels where there were none, and an unnecessary framework which allows the director to gloss over the girls' significantly less dramatic childhoods.

Furthermore, some significant facts are bended: Jackie's instructor William Pleeth, her "cello daddy," and one of her most important influences, is presented as an anonymous first cello teacher – which he certainly wasn't.

Also, there is a very overdone scene of Jackie's "last concert," where she is depicted as dropping her bow and being unable to walk off stage—being carried off by her mercurial lover Barenboim, who was conducting the concert—in fact, this never happened, and in any case her last concert was conducted by Bernstein.

But of course, any "true story" must necessarily be reformatted to fit the screen, so I could even forgive these liberties if they succeeded in fleshing out a coherent narrative. Director Anand Tucker has chosen to attempt a "challenging" dual presentation of the same events (from Hilary's perspective, then from Jackie's) which first gives the viewer the impression that Hilary is selfish, mean, and crazy, and then subsequently that she is naive, unsocialized, and sick.

Rather than portraying Jackie as a saint or a demon, Tucker hedges on all levels and settles for manipulating the viewer to see things one way and then another.

This does not actually provide the intended ambiguity, but in fact just makes a mess of a film that is pointlessly hard to follow and without any commitment toward a stance on Jackie at all.

One of the things that I was surprised at was that the film chose not to portray two events that Hilary du Pré recounts in her book that perhaps would have seemed too unrealistic—one in which a very young Jackie informs her sister that when she gets older, she won't be able to walk, and also, Jackie's admission that she had been raped while studying in Russia with Rostropovich.

Instead, what is portrayed on screen is a scene where a young Jackie meets the future Jackie at the beach, and Jackie tells her "Everything's going to be alright." Terrible choice on the part of the filmmakers. What's alright about MS? The incontinence? The dementia? The stress on the family?

And in place of the rape, we are given a series of scenes that depict an undefined sense of dread for Jackie that is expressed (literally) as her cello threatening her. I swear, it was like two steps away from actually giving the cello a speaking part voiced by Bruce Willis. Strike two.

The main emotional thrust of the movie centers around Jackie's affair with Hilary's husband Kiffer Finzi, which is not accurately contextualized at all and is played out for shock value (the film's tag line is even "The true story of two sisters who shared a passion, a madness, and a man").

In reality, this situation arose out of Jackie's illness, but here it is unclear to the viewer that Jackie is not merely trying to take what Hilary has just because she can. Jackie's relationship with Barenboim is accurately portrayed, and I suspect it won't do him any favors with his Chicago audience (he is currently principal conductor of the CSO).

The Elgar cello concerto is featured in all the film's dramatic moments, somewhat diminishing its power through repetition of the same few bars, but overall, the music in the movie is appropriate and dynamic (not counting one embarrassing sequence in which Jackie and Barenboim launch into "You Really Got Me" after playing Beethoven – awkwardly tacked on as a deliberate overture to those who think the Kronos Quartet are the greatest classical musicians of all time).

The performances are generally good, with Emily Watson proving once again (as in Breaking the Waves) that she is utterly compelling yet not particularly talented. Indeed, you can't take your eyes off her, yet in some scenes she's laughably bad (the MS years in particular are performed with a lack of subtlety only Geri Jewell could have topped, and a histrionic death scene is so overdramatic I'm surprised you can't hear the crew laughing on screen).

As Hilary, Rachel Griffiths is unmemorable but believable in a thankless part. Probably my favorite person in the movie was the nameless Itzhak Perlman look-a-like who is very briefly featured in one scene.

When all is said and done, I would recommend Hilary and Jackie as a fair introduction to the life of Jacqueline du Pré, but it is neither an especially accurate one nor a very good movie. It gives du Pré a Shine-treatment that belittles her standing as one of the century's greatest musicians. Still, it is undeniably interesting and watchable, and I suppose any film attempting to deal with the whole of du Pré's life (professional and personal) is bound to slip up.

I am unreserved in my disappointment with Hilary and Jackie, but it's not the end of the world—I mean it's not like I have MS! 🤷

Review by Alberto Gibraltar