The Senator
Sunday, Sky Premiere HD, 10.40am & 6.10pm
IT IS JULY 1969, the Apollo 11 moonshot is in progress and US senator Ted Kennedy is aspiring to emerge from the shadow of his assassinated elder brothers, Jack and Bobby, for his own tilt at the presidency. Instead, a late-night drive following a boozy party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts sinks his political hopes when his car plunges off a bridge, drowning 28-yearold campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.
We’ll never know exactly what happened, but this well-crafted, insightful and persuasive movie does a convincing job of recreating that night and the shifty cover-up that came next.
Jason Clarke is very good as the ineffectual Ted, while Kate Mara makes her mark as Mary Jo, one of the idealistic ‘boiler room girls’ who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Bruce Dern shines, too, as Joseph Kennedy, the stroke-stricken Kennedy family patriarch. Ed Helms, who plays Ted’s principled cousin Joseph Gargan, acts as the story’s moral compass. 2017, 12, 106min