"Behind every great man is a great woman”: It’s an adage that’s been brought home to in our postfeminist age. Witness the apotheosis of Michelle Obama on the cover of the current Vogue and the new “Jackie,” with Natalie Portman transcendent as the tragic former first lady.

Indeed, her Jacqueline B. Kennedy and Jackie herself are better than director Pablo Larrain’s “Jackie.” For one thing, the movie’s music, no doubt intended to strike a discordant note, is merely jarring. It underscores other false notes. Why is the boy who plays John F. Kennedy Jr. a blond? And why does Peter Sarsgaard’s Robert F. Kennedy fail to speak with his distinctive broad Boston cadence, particularly when Portman’s Jackie speaks in her signature breathy New Yorkese? And why do we see her not once but twice in a red gown when she mainly favored white and pastel formal wear?

Perhaps this is quibbling. What “Jackie” and Portman’s Jackie do very well is locate her grief and then show us how she cycles through it, reinventing her husband, his presidency – and, thus, herself – in what remains in some ways a pyrrhic victory. ...

I’m still trying to wrap my mind – and, more difficultly, my heart – around the presidential election. You can talk about the failure of the Democrats to appeal to working-class voters; their reliance on the Barack Obama coalition (blacks, Latinos, women, millennials), which did not hold for the Dems – at least not in great enough numbers, and that includes you, Colin Kaepernick; a certitude, a smugness even, that wasn’t justified; the role of F.B.I. director James Comey in underscoring the tightening race in the last two weeks before the election; but at the end of the day, it was all about the zeitgeist.

Donald Trump was not merely the “change” candidate, again (Remember when Obama was the change candidate?); he was the regular-guy billionaire you could sit down and have a cheeseburger with, the one who understood America’s deeply ingrained nativist, isolationist, homogenous longings. This has always been – for all our forays into wars around the world – a determinedly inward-looking country. ...

Grief as reinvention: Jackie and ‘Jackie’

The remains of the day