The existence of Chappaquiddick, the new movie about the 1969 car accident from which Ted Kennedy walked away while his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne likely suffocated slowly inside his partly sunken Oldsmobile, is a miracle of a kind. The script by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan was included on the 2015 Black List, the annual compendium of yet-to-be-sold screenplays of un-common quality. Only a third of Black List titles ever make it to the big screen. And the fact that Allen and Logan’s screenplay offered a cold-eyed view of a liberal icon gave everyone reason to think it would stay among the unfilmed.
And yet filmed it was—a strong, astringent piece of work, beautifully directed by John Curran and centering on a brilliantly understated performance by the Australian Jason Clarke. And released it has been—by a company called Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures, run by former stand-up comedian Byron Allen (no relation to Taylor Allen). “There are some very powerful people who tried to put pressure on me not to release this movie,” Byron Allen told reporters. “They went out of their way to try and influence me in a negative way. I made it very clear that I’m not about the right, I’m not about the left. I’m about the truth.”
The effort to strong-arm Allen in this way has a historical parallel. In 1987, the journalist Leo Damore turned in to Random House his manuscript for Senatorial Privilege—an investigation of Chappaquiddick for which the publishing firm had paid a $150,000 advance. The book was a reportorial masterpiece. Yet Random House rejected it on the outrageous grounds that it was somehow “libelous.” Later published by Regnery, it became a bestseller.
Damore’s account isn’t ideological. It is, rather, a meticulous, hour-by-hour rendering of the accident and what followed. Nor did screenwriters Allen and Logan come at the subject ideologically. They were attracted to it because they thought the tale fit nicely into the recent pop-culture appetite for controversial true-life crime stories; they were especially taken with Foxcatcher, the Steve Carell movie about the murder of an Olympic wrestler by a du Pont heir.
In their telling, Chappaquiddick is a story about how a powerful person worms his way out of trouble. It suggests Teddy went through several long, dark nights in which he struggled with his conscience, and it concludes with his disgraceful nationally televised speech in which he said his own conduct the night he let Kopechne die “make[s] no sense to me at all.” It evokes Damore’s painstaking revelations of how the tentacles of the Kennedy network ensured Ted escaped with barely a wrist slap.
Rereading Damore’s book after seeing the movie, I was struck by something that hadn’t made an impression on me 30 years ago. Damore shows how the media of the day—with the shameful exception of the slavering Boston Globe—were overwhelmingly skeptical about Kennedy’s tale and deeply critical of his conduct. In fact, what makes the cover-up so startling in retrospect is that it took place in the teeth of this nationwide media skepticism. It was a raw power play. Teddy and his henchmen felt free to flex their muscles in any way necessary. That is how completely their home state had become a vassal state. You get only a taste of this from the movie.
Clarke isn’t the only standout here. Ed Helms, known almost exclusively as a wild comic talent, gives a beautifully subdued performance as Joe Gargan, the Kennedy cousin and family fixer who found himself trying to rescue Kopechne from the Oldsmobile. And the comedian Jim Gaffigan matches him as Kennedy hanger-on Paul Markham, whose day job as the U.S. attorney for the district of Massachusetts didn’t keep him from doing whatever he could to protect the holy family’s surviving son and blessed name.
Chappaquiddick has one grave flaw. Teddy interacts repeatedly with his stroke-afflicted father Joseph (Bruce Dern), who speaks the word “alibi,” slaps him across the face, and in general makes it clear he loathes his boy. I hold no brief for Joseph Kennedy, one of the more repellent Americans of the 20th century, but there’s no evidence any of this happened or that he was even compos mentis by the time of Chappaquiddick. The falsity of these scenes takes away from the devastatingly suggestive tone of the rest.
The Kennedy mythologizers are still out in force. The day the movie opened, the New York Times published an assault on it by the film historian Neal Gabler, who suggested it was beyond the pale because “by the end of his life . . . the then white-maned senator had managed to transcend celebrity and emotional paralysis and become what he had long aspired to be: an indispensable legislator.” Kennedy’s indispensability is a matter of opinion. Mary Jo Kopechne’s dispensability for Edward M. Kennedy was not. He lived for four decades and five weeks after the night he drove off Dike Bridge. Kopechne died in agony in mere hours and probably could have been saved if he’d cared enough to give a thought to her saving. She was 28 years old. Gabler claims the accident “haunted” Ted, as though that is somehow exculpatory. For the Kennedys, there will always be those progressives in thrall to a bizarre dynastic delusion and ready to proffer their excuses in a staggeringly inappropriate tone of moral offense. For them, it is an offense that Chappaquiddick exists. For those who long ago threw out their original-cast album of Camelot, the existence of Chappaquiddick is a welcome moment of American cultural sanity.
