The movie isn’t a hit piece, but the history it tells is infuriating.
Chappaquiddick must be counted one of the great untold stories in American political history: The average citizen may be vaguely aware of what happened but probably has little notion of just how contemptible was the behavior of Senator Ted Kennedy. Mainstream book publishers and Hollywood have mostly steered clear of the subject for 48 years.
If Chappaquiddick had been released in 1970, it would have ended Kennedy’s political career.
Chappaquiddick the movie fills in an important gap, and if it had been released in 1970, it would have ended Kennedy’s political career. (It was only a few weeks ago that a sitting senator resigned over far less disturbing behavior than Kennedy’s.) Yet this potent and penetrating film is not merely an attack piece. It’s more than fair to Kennedy in its hesitance to depict him as drunk on the night in question, and it also pictures him repeatedly diving into the pond on Chappaquiddick Island, trying to rescue his brother Bobby’s former aide Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara). He may or may not have made such rescue attempts. Moreover, as directed by John Curran (The Painted Veil), the film is suffused with lament that a man in Kennedy’s position could have been so much more than he was. Yet Ted, the last and least of four brothers, was shoved into a role for which he simply lacked the character. That the other three were dynamic leaders who died violently while he alone lived on to become the Senate’s Jabba the Hutt is perhaps the most dizzying chapter of the century-long Kennedy epic.
Jason Clarke, an Australian, is superb as Ted, who as of July 18, 1969, is mulling a run for president in 1972. To that end, he gives a solemn TV interview and then, when the cameras are off, turns to his family flunkies and insists that they round up the juicy “boiler-room girls” without whom, he says, there can be no Friday-night party at the beach cottage, on the island at the eastern edge of Martha’s Vineyard. Kennedy’s wife, Joan, being pregnant, is home on bed rest. Meanwhile, the space program that John F. Kennedy championed is two days away from culmination in the moon landing. The contrast between one’s brother’s far-reaching vision and his soft-bellied sibling’s grubby venality is so conspicuous that you could castigate the screenwriters for inventing it; except they didn’t.