If the review in Variety is accurate, Chappaquiddick, a docudrama that was reviewed at the Toronto Film Festival, may be the first genuine attempt to relate the corruption that allowed Senator Edward Kennedy to escape responsibility in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
As Owen Gliberman writes for Variety, the film begins the day of the notorious accident, at the Kennedy cottage in Chappaquiddick, where Kennedy is trying to convince Kopechne, who had left Washington D.C. because she was distraught over the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, to return.
At roughly 11 p.m., as the film relates, Kennedy (who has been downing whiskey) and Kopechne leave to head for the beach. The film posits that Kennedy zoomed away from a policeman so he would not be seen with Kopechne, and in the process took his eyes off the road, plunging the car off the bridge and into the river.
Glieberman writes:
It’s a short wooden structure, with no guard rails, and after fighting his way out of the water, he walks, in a daze, back to the cottage. He may be soused, but he’s already in damage-control mode. At the cottage, when he sees Joe Gargan, his cousin, friend, and lawyer, the first thing he says is, “We’ve got a problem,” followed by a quick, “I’m not going to be president.” He’s already thinking about himself, and no one but himself. He is thinking, in other words, like a Kennedy. Joe and their other comrade, the Massachusetts Attorney General Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan), both tell Ted that he needs to report the crime, and he assures them that he will. But what he knows is that reporting the crime means he’ll be tested for alcohol consumption, so he has to wait. And wait.
According to the film, writes Glieberman, “Kopechne’s body was found in a position that implied that she was struggling to keep her head out of the water. And what the film suggests is that once the car turned upside down, she didn’t die; she was alive and then drowned, after a period of time, as the water seeped in. This makes Edward Kennedy’s decision not to report the crime a clear-cut act of criminal negligence — but in spirit (if not legally), it renders it something closer to an act of killing.”
Glieberman notes, “ … the movie is fundamentally the portrait of a weasel: a man who, from the moment the accident happens, takes as his premise that he will not suffer the consequences, and then does what it takes to twist reality so that it conforms to that scenario.”
In the film, Kennedy’s father Joseph P. Kennedy, who is an 80-year-old stroke victim who can barely speak, manages to blurt out, “Alibi.”
The group that protects Kennedy includes speechwriter Ted Sorenson, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and a local physician, who falsely declares Kennedy suffered a concussion; the local prosecutor, an old friend of Kennedy’s, only charges him with leaving the scene of an accident, which results in a suspended sentence.
The film shows Kennedy’s post-accident explanation that is full of holes, as well as his clumsy attempt to validate his false neck injury by wearing a neck brace to Kopechne’s funeral while being perfectly able to move his neck, along with his call to the Kopechne family that seems remorseful but is only a momentary lapse.
Glieberman writes:
Forty-eight years later, let’s be clear on what the meaning of Chappaquiddick is. Ted Kennedy should, by all rights, have stood trial for involuntary manslaughter, which would likely have ended his political career. The fact that the Kennedy family — the original postwar dynasty of the one percent — possessed, and exerted, the influence to squash the case is the essence of what Chappaquiddick means. The Kennedys lived outside the law; the one instance in American history of an illegally stolen presidential election was the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. He in all likelihood lost the race to Richard Nixon, but his father tried to steal the election for him by manipulating the vote tallies in (among other places) Illinois. That’s the meaning of Chappaquiddick. too.
As a movie, “Chappaquiddick” doesn’t embellish the incidents it shows us, because it doesn’t have to. It simply delivers the truth of what happened: the logistical truth of the accident, and also the squirmy truth of what went on in Ted Kennedy’s soul. The result may play like avid prose rather than investigative cinema poetry, but it still adds up to a movie that achieves what too few American political dramas do: a reckoning.