'Chappaquiddick': Ted Kennedy Drives Into A Scandal [TIFF Review]

It’s the summer of ’69, but Senator Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) didn’t buy his first real six-string or start a band with the guys from school, as the Bryan Adams song goes. Instead, he’s still mourning the tragic killing of his brother Bobby Kennedy a year earlier, while mulling his own possible presidential run. To the latter end, he’s gathered together six of the “boiler-room girls” who worked on behalf of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign for a party. The women might be staying with the family, so to speak, should Ted decide to start on the path to the White House, and it’s an opportunity to bond with the politician and his team. There’s an air of impropriety given that for every girl, there’s a Kennedy clan man, all of whom happen to be married. But by time the evening ends, headlines will be made not only in the titular hamlet of Chappaquiddick,” but across the country, as yet another scandal lands on the porch of the cursed family.

Unlike the charming John, and the idealistic Bobby, at thirty-seven years old, Ted doesn’t seem to have yet figured out what part of his personality makes him special to the public. The deaths of his siblings have thrust him into the uncomfortable and unwanted position of being the face of the Kennedys, and it’s a leadership position he’s wholly unsuited for. When Ted takes a late night drive with boiler room girl Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) that ends up with his car upside down in a pond, and the young woman dead, a snowball of bad decisions underscores his inability to manage this awful situation. The more he tries to cover things up — possibly because there was more than just friendship between Ted and Mary, or maybe because of his shame at being unable to save her life — the worse it looks. But the stakes are far beyond what it’ll mean for his political career — there is also the question of whether or not the Kennedys political brand can survive.

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There is a lot to work with in “Chappaquiddick,” but director John Curran (“Stone,” “Tracks“) keeps things clinical to a fault. The machine that starts moving around Ted, once it becomes clear that he’s not up to the task of handling this himself, stirs a certain amount of queasiness at how calculated it all is. The team of the Kennedy faithful play the Apollo moon landing that’s capturing the nation’s attention at the time to their advantage, and have no qualms about bending the “truth” to the version of events they want to put forth. This is all to please aging patriarch Joe Kennedy, whose approval Ted still seeks, and who still dreams of his lineage making it to the highest office in the land. The wheelchair-bound figurehead of the clan can barely speak or move, but still wields Darth Vader like terror upon those around him (his heavy breathing on the phone even evokes the fallen Jedi). This is all happening to the dismay of Ted’s longtime friend and cousin, Joe Gargan (Ed Helms), who has never been a true Kennedy but feels increasingly pushed out. Ted’s willingness to protect his self-image and shed his moral compass makes him unrecognizable as the person Joe thought he knew. But for all of this maneuvering, the crisis feels minor key.

Screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan have certainly gone deep with their research, but missing in all of this is any sense of justice for Mary Jo. There is a passing thought that her parents, Democratic and Kennedy devotees, will never know the truth, and are perhaps blinded by their political fidelity, but that’s about as much consideration that the film gives the matter. Whatever Mary Jo’s close boiler room friend, played by an underutilized Olivia Thirlby, thinks about the matter is pushed aside as she seems to jump without hesitation onto the spin train. The parallels you could draw the current administration are obvious, but frankly, this sort of backroom dealing also feels de rigeur for any high-profile politician, though few of them tend to be dealing with a dead body on their hands.

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What’s more intriguing is the much slower news cycle of the 1960s, and it’s an element of the story could’ve further been emphasized. If this kind of story broke today, with a Senator involved in an accident with a dead staffer who is not their partner, their career would be over. Each part of the story would be picked over and scrutinized. Certainly, no one would’ve survived to have a decade’s long career that followed, and one where Ted Kennedy was largely able to step out of the shadow of this event (though, it probably hampered any real chance he ever had at the presidency). It would’ve been instructive to see how news organizations were approaching the entire affair, particularly given the celebrity of the Kennedys, and perhaps potential concerns about future access.

As it stands, “Chappaquiddick” is a reminder that while Camelot had its fair share of tragedy, none of the Kennedys were angels — but we already knew that, right? The purpose of the film is a bit muddled. Mary Jo Kopechne was certainly treated with a galling lack of dignity, and Ted Kennedy came out of everything largely unscathed, willingly walking through the muck to save his image and that of the family. But with Ted in the grave, “Chappaquiddick” hardly lands with the power of an exposé, and doesn’t bite hard enough to spur a reconsideration of the Kennedys. The film revives a chapter in Kennedy history, but what it means nearly forty years later is never quite clear. [C]

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