Fascinating take on the ’69 Kennedy Chappaquiddick accident
After more than 50 years, a film based on the notorious Chappaquiddick accident has finally arrived. It paints a picture of what ostensibly occurred one fateful night in July 1969.
This is the one in which a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned when Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car off the infamous bridge to the island into swirling water.
How many of the facts surrounding the incident are true or merely conjecture is open to debate, but what emerges here is an absorbing slice of imaginative film-making.
Under director John Curran’s deft hand, the production is transformed into a sort of suspense drama wrapped in scandal and mystery. It’s a fascinating take on the whole affair, but runs a little dry towards the end.
Jason Clarke breathes fresh life into the lead character, Senator Ted Kennedy, whose presidential ambitions were thrown into turmoil the night he gave his campaign aide, Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara), a lift to catch the ferry back to the mainland.
Kennedy got inebriated during a party in the Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick Island cottage and was in no condition to drive. But he did drive and the accident did happen.
What transpired after that fleshes out the remainder of the film as his family and team of advisors tried desperately to avert his fall from grace with a master class in political spin, damage control and image management
Kopechne was an aspiring political strategist and a Kennedy insider, but not much about her comes out in the film. The focus is strictly on Kennedy, whose colossal misjudgement ultimately changed the course of presidential history forever.
The fateful party took place at a cottage on Chappaquiddick Island (at the seaward end of Martha’s Vineyard), on the weekend of a small sailing regatta. It served as a reunion of the extended Kennedy family and party goers included his hot-shot lawyer cousin, “Joey Will Fix It” Gargan (Ed Helms) and like-minded state’s attorney (Jim Gaffigan).
Through true accounts, documented in the inquest from the investigation in 1969, Curran and writers Andrew Logan and Taylor Allen, intimately expose the broad reach of political power, the influence of the US’s most celebrated family and the vulnerability of Kennedy, the youngest son who was living in the shadow of his family legacy.
This cinematic enterprise at least puts a face and person behind a name that history has bandied about like a political football for all these decades – Mary Jo Kopechne.
There’s a great deal we don’t know about the accident. While the film sometimes sensationalises the grey areas, the indisputable fact is that the Kennedy clan made sure the public would never know the full story.