Ronan Farrow just did not care for Jackie, thank you very much

Ronan Farrow is extremely good at his job. This is well-known. He broke or helped break some of the biggest stories of sexual harassment, abuse, and misconduct of the last several years, alongside reporters like Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. And like Kantor and Twohey, he has a new book out, one that’s made some huge, and predictably upsetting, news this week. All of this is to say that there are more important things about Farrow’s Catch And Kill than the bit that follows. Much more.

But also wow, the man did not care for Jackie. (We did.)

This news came to our attention courtesy of New York’s Hunter Harris, who points us to excerpts shared on Twitter by Variety’s Kate Aurthur. While reading Farrow’s book, and subsequently reporting on its contents—specifically, the allegation that Matt Lauer raped former NBC News colleague Brooke Nevils in 2014—Aurthur noted not one, not two, but several references to the 2016 film, which starred Natalie Portman, and they are pointed.

The Lauer story is the important one. This one is just entertaining.

Jackie’s screenwriter was NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Farrow alleges that Oppenheim attempted to squash (at best) his coverage of Harvey Weinstein—Vanity Fair has more reporting on that today. However, he also alleges that Oppenheim made a shitty movie, and that The New Yorker’s David Remnick agrees:

“He wrote Jackie,” I replied.

“That,” Remnick said gravely, “was a bad movie.”

But that isn’t it! Farrow also describes Jackie, which rules, as a “morose biopic” that features “a lot of dialogue-free shots of the woman in question pacing around with tear-streaked mascara.” (He is not wrong about the mascara; he is wrong about the mascara being bad.)