Jason Clarke plays the youngest Kennedy brother, self-pityingly facing prosecution and trying to salvage his political career, in this over-lenient film
“I learned a great lesson from Chappaquiddick … don’t drive over narrow bridges when you’re pissed out of your mind.” This gag from the BBC’s 1970s sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News, with Griff Rhys Jones playing a sombre Ted Kennedy, perfectly encapsulates his cynicism and self-pity. It seems to me more apposite than this lenient movie about Chappaquiddick, which now belatedly appears in the
UK, starring Jason Clarke as Kennedy, scripted by first-time feature writers Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, and directed by John Curran.While driving back in darkness from a party at Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts in July 1969, Kennedy’s car went off a narrow bridge into the water. Kennedy swam clear, but his passenger drowned: Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman who had worked as a researcher for his late brother Bobby. Having failed to report the incident for eight hours and toyed with the idea of claiming Mary Jo was driving, Kennedy finally admitted to leaving the scene of an accident, accepted a suspended two-year sentence and gave a televised address claiming he hadn’t been drinking and there was no impropriety with Kopechne. The US had no great appetite for spoiling the moon-landing euphoria with a political scandal, or spoiling the tragic Kennedy mystique . So the media and political classes suppressed their distaste and embarrassment, allowing Kennedy to plough on with his long but undistinguished senatorial career and a failed bid for the
Democratic presidential nomination in 1980.Clarke plausibly plays an entitled and defensive Kennedy, his flushed face set in a rictus of fear and unrepentant resentment; Kate Mara is Kopechne, and Bruce Dern is the macabre figure of Joe Kennedy Sr, incapacitated by a stroke and seething with mute rage and contempt for his deadbeat son. It’s a movie that in important ways is on Ted Kennedy’s side. It does not show him drinking heavily, or drinking much at all at the party, and does not show him kissing or having sex with the similarly non-drinking Kopechne; just being very close and intimate about his fears and plans. And when the car starts going out of control, it is Mary Jo’s panicky gesticulation that obscures his view of the road.