Chappa-quir it, already!
Film a Kennedy-worship reality check
NEARLY 50 years after Sen. Ted Kennedy left a young woman to die in a shallow pond — and America went on to reward him with a lifelong career in the US Senate — we are finally beginning to reckon with the Kennedy myth. But only just. The new film “Chappaquiddick” is, to date, the most brutal and honest account of what happened that night. But it’s also something else: an indictment of our collective hero worship at the altar of Brand Kennedy, which bred so much corrosive entitlement that surviving brother Ted, the family beta male, went home to sleep it off after leaving a loyal young staffer to die alone.
“Chappaquiddick” is a muchneeded counterweight to two current hagiographies: CNN’s docuseries “The Kennedys,” airing to high ratings on Sunday nights, and Netflix’s forthcoming documentary, “Bobby Kennedy for President.”
JFK and RFK remain, of course, the family lodestars. But in 1969, Ted was next in line, and he had a lot of public sympathy.
His brother Robert had been assassinated while campaigning for president the year before. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Ted himself barely survived a plane crash in 1964, dragged to safety by former Sen. Birch Bayh (the irony) and hospitalized for five months. It was assumed, within the family and without, that Ted would run for president in 1972. He had three small children and, during the July weekend he went partying in Chappaquiddick, a pregnant wife at home confined to bed rest.
As portrayed by Jason Clarke, the young senator is a venal, self-pitying coward, thoughtless and remorseless, ambition his only care. He treats loyalists and groupies with equal contempt and, as the weekend begins, toasts them all for “wanting to prove yourselves worthy of . . . the Kennedy name.”
It’s clear the filmmakers are in on this joke.
We next see Kennedy leaving the party with the young Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked for Bobby Kennedy and was still mourning his death. The film depicts Ted as drinking and driving before his black Oldsmobile 88 flies off a small wooden bridge and into a pond, crash-landing upside down.
According to contemporaneous accounts, the tide was dead low, the water only 5 or 6 feet deep. Both of the passenger-side windows were blown out. Kennedy later testified that Mary Jo might have been hitting or kicking him in her frantic struggle to escape. He claimed to have gone back under for her six or seven times, but there is no proof. He was seen at 2:25 a.m. in dry clothes by a hotel desk clerk.
When Mary Jo’s body was recovered the next morning, it appeared that she died not of drowning but suffocation. She likely lived for hours. There she had been, her head and neck jammed at a sharp angle up against the foot board, gasping through a small air pocket. Was she wondering where Kennedy was? Was she convinced he was on the verge of coming back for her? That he had gone to get help?
After all, who would leave someone in this situation alone? Least of all someone who had suffered so much loss so young?
Ted Kennedy passed by nearby lighted homes and the local fire department as he walked back to his inn, away from the pond he’d later claim was deep and at high tide. He slept that night as Mary Jo took her last breaths.
The next morning, Ted refused to appear at the scene when summoned, demanding that the chief of police come down to the station. There, the chief finds Kennedy behind the cop’s own desk, reading a carefully worded statement. He doesn’t mention Mary Jo by her full name because he doesn’t know how to spell “Kopechne.”
Ten hours had passed since the car went in the water.
But Ted’s only concern is that he’ll never be president. Criminal charges don’t concern him, not does he ever consider he might go to prison. He is, after all, a Kennedy.
Ted flees the island, helps block an autopsy, and attends Mary Jo’s funeral wearing a fake neck brace. For a time, he considers blaming the dead girl and telling the police that she was driving. Instead, he blames the bridge; he claims exhaustion; he tells The New York Times he has a concussion and is on sedatives, until the Times reporter informs him no doctor would ever give sedatives to someone who has been concussed.
And Ted feels sorry for himself all over again. Ted the eternal screw-up.
The film’s one flaw is, ironically, the glancing depiction of the women here. Mary Jo, played by Kate Mara, is never really fleshed out: She is The Girl, a young blonde who is very serious and very starstruck, but not much more. And Ted’s wife, Joan — who was bullied by the family into calling Mary Jo’s parents and invoking Kennedy-family tragedy to keep them under their control, and who suffered a miscarriage weeks later — appears onscreen for mere seconds, but speaking for us all when she says, “Go f--k yourself, Teddy.”
In the end, Ted Kennedy pled to nothing more than leaving the scene of an accident. He received a suspended sentence of 2 months’ jail time. He would never be president, but he spent the rest of his life held in high esteem by the Democratic Party. When he died, in 2009, Chappaquiddick and Mary Jo Kopechne were barely mentioned. Instead he was canonized by the Senate as its Liberal Lion, a fighter for the poor, the dispossessed and, yes, women.
This film, in this #MeToo era, should begin to change all that. It should begin a new conversation about the Kennedy family in American life.
THE Kennedys won’t be watching this one on movie night.
The new historical drama “Chappaquiddick” is far from a love letter to the famous family. It paints them as a hollow dynasty of pretty faces hiding behind a powerful name, while real men of intellect and influence manipulate their every move. Camelot, it’s not.
And, as this terrific movie suggests, the American people fall for their polished BS every time.
The story told here was a new kind of tragedy for the clan. Unlike the assassinations of Robert and John F. Kennedy, this was a disaster of a Kennedy’s own making.
In July 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara), a former Bobby Kennedy campaign staffer, drowned when Sen. Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) drove their car off a bridge on the titular Massachusetts island. The bozo didn’t report the accident for 10 hours. He booked a hotel room — and got brunch.
In this riveting telling, the senator — helped by cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) and US Attorney Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan) — then tries to manipulate the tale to paint himself as the real victim to keep his own presidential ambitions alive. He never reaches the White House, but, being a Kennedy, he sticks around in the Senate for another 40 years.
At first, director John Curran treats this sad chapter of history in a somber, straightforward manner. The color palette is muted for its summer beach-town setting, and the mood is anything but fancyfree. You may start to cringe when Teddy is treated too sympathetically. He frequently whines that he’s living in the shadow of both of his dead brothers. And he’s detested by his father, Joseph, who’s played as a near-death crank by Bruce Dern.
Then “Chappaquiddick” becomes an unexpected hoot.
Locked in a room in the Kennedys’ Hyannis Port, Mass., manse, a group of government movers and shakers rip every dufus move Teddy makes: Leaking a false story to a journalist that he had a concussion and was treated with sedatives (he’d have died). Wearing an unneeded neck brace to the girl’s funeral (poor me!). Giving the press a written statement filled with inaccuracies (willing self-destruction). The drama becomes a farce.
The screenwriters, Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, have said their aim was not to have a political slant, but to honor the late Kopechne, who was an afterthought in the media at the time. The duo has indeed honored her, and in so doing definitely given their movie a political slant. This movie is very obviously anti-Ted Kennedy.
For example, it suggests the senator may have been drunk, a claim he always denied. And it posits that maybe he didn’t try to save the woman at all, even though Kennedy said he dove down repeatedly to no avail.
Clarke, a marvelous actor, gives a perfect performance as the eventual Lion of the Senate. He never becomes too likable, too villainous, too clownish or too reverent — his human Teddy is a masterful blend of all of the above. Plus, he really looks like the guy.
When Teddy gives his speech to the nation in the end, explaining his actions, Clarke, in an Oscar-worthy moment, is so compassionate and sincere that your heart goes out to the man. Who wouldn’t re-elect this dude who pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of a fatal accident that he caused? And that is the whole point of this shrewdly crafted movie. Running time: 101 minutes. Rated PG-13 (disturbing images, some strong language). Now playing. — Johnny Oleksinski