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Film Review: Chappaquiddick, the story of Teddy Kennedy

Film Review: Chappaquiddick, the story of Teddy Kennedy April 24, 2018Culture, FilmOff

Chappaquiddick is the story of Senator Edward ’Teddy’ Kennedy and his struggles with the recent loss of two illustrious brothers and the familial strain and life-changing effects this has wrought. The film centres on one night in 1969, a key incident and the aftermath that ensues.

Played carefully by Jason Clarke (Lawless, Zero Dark Thirty, Mudbound), Kennedy is shown to be a man out of sync with the surrounding expectations of his dynastic family and one not capable of handling the responsibility foisted upon him. Ed Helms, Jim Gaffigan, and Kate Mara play cousin, attorney, and employee, respectively, and round out a solid if unexciting central cast. Bruce Dern, with a brief patriarchal cameo, steals the key lasting impression.

The incident at the heart of Chappaquiddick is the death of young aide Mary Jo Kopechne on the evening of July 18th. Kennedy is throwing a small party on the Massachusetts island of the film’s name for friends and the “Boiler Girls”, six women who’d been a part of Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign the previous year. A short time before midnight, Kennedy and Kopechne leave the party by car, with an intoxicated Kennedy driving, which leads to an accident that takes the life of Kopechne and threatens to dissolve Kennedy’s.

The themes and parallels in Chappaquiddick are the most interesting areas of the film. Responsibility, depression, and white privilege are all explored, but it’s the theme of media manipulation that’s given most focus. This is not a new theme in film, but it’s writ large here and the parallels to a Trump-ed United States are plain to see.

On one side is a young presidential hopeful striving to retain credibility, and respectability, in the eyes of the general public despite negligently causing the death of a young woman. The aim is self-preservation via control of the message, albeit via flirtations with altruism. This control is broad, ranging from the direction of the police statements to the public through to how and when the story is reported in the national press. Although the theme is familiar, it is the first time I remember a film focusing so specifically on managing the public perception around an incident, regardless of its severity. In this way, it feels like a very modern tale and it’s easy to understand why it has been made now.

The media manipulation we see daily in 2018, you feel, is the counterpoint the filmmakers want us to see most clearly. In Donald Trump, we’ve seen an individual eagerly weaponise the media to his own use and, while the application is somewhat reversed, the core idea of controlling the message is fundamentally the same. If Chappaquiddick happened in 2018, it would be easy to imagine the Kennedy team getting ahead of the story via targeted Twitter salvos.

Equally, themes of white privilege are explored. No person of colour appears in the film and you feel this is a deliberate visual metaphor of the privilege Kennedy is bestowed. More overtly, this leads on to commentary around how you can walk away from a car with someone dying inside and from any repercussions that would normally come of it, if only your family has a powerful name and money and you look the expected way. It’s hard to imagine this wasn’t a standout interest for Byron Allen when deciding to distribute the film.

Unfortunately, the film struggles when it’s required to pull these various threads into an interesting whole. Whilst the constituent pieces are all of interest, they are not held together with any charisma. This feels deliberate around Kennedy as the film, correctly, does not want to elicit any sympathy for him. However, we see so little of Kopechne and her story that we’re left cold and somewhat directionless at the conclusion.

Ryan Goodyear
24 April 2018