By now there have been quite a few movies made about the Kennedys, and naturally we assumed that Chappaquiddick, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, would be another brazen attempt to make craven excuses and burnish the legend. However, early reviews suggest it might be an honest-to-God reckoning with Ted Kennedy’s heinous crime. After calling the film a “meticulous docudrama [that] rivetingly recounts the tragic car accident and its aftermath,” Variety’s reviewer went on to offer his thoughts on liberal America’s excuses:
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. . . . I don’t say any of this as a right-wing troll. But those are the facts, and they are facts that liberals, too often, have been willing to shove under the carpet. And they have paid the price. Ted Kennedy became known as “the Lion of the Senate,” and did a lot of good, but when you try to build a governing philosophy on top of lies, one way or another those lies will come back to haunt you. (Hello, Donald Trump! He’s an incompetent bully, but his middle name might be “Liberal Karma.”)
