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Chappaquiddick (John Curran)

One thing I'll say about this film is that it's admirably restrained. It fills in some unknown details, obviously, and not in ways that are very flattering to Kennedy, but nothing all that salacious or unfair. Frankly, it's shockingly responsible, and who could have guessed that?

Still, I was struck by how little insight the movie had into the incident. Like virtually everyone I'm sure, the filmmakers seem to think that there's something awfully shady about what happened, but damned if they know what. So the result is pretty strange - it's a film that wants to be about corruption but doesn't really have the goods. Kennedy, of course, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident, but even the way this film portrays the events, it seems at least possible if not outright likely that that's all he was really guilty of. Or at the very least, that it's all that he would have been convicted of, even if he wasn't famous and rich.

To be sure, there's a lot of effort to show how the law bends over backwards to accommodate the Kennedys, and of course the lawyers and fixers do their lawyer and fixer stuff, but it's strange how little actual effect all this seems to have. In fact, for the most part it all backfires, to the extent that if a Martian were to watch this to gauge the fairness of the legal system, he might well conclude that the system is largely immune to the sway of money and power. And yet it's hard to escape the feeling that the film doesn't see things the same way - it's a movie whose narrative is pulling against the themes.

And honestly, it's not really very good anyway. Curran's direction is extremely bland and never establishes any kind of mood - the Kennedy compound must have been a chaotic place during that week, but the film never gives any sense of what that must have been like. Apparently Teddy just had a couple of mostly laid-back meetings with the lawyers and Bob McNamara, whose tentacles were truly in everything back in those days. There's an attempt to tie in the moon landing, both narratively and thematically as a symbol of the Kennedy mystique or something, that didn't seem very well thought out and fell flat for me. And while he uncannily looks the part, Jason Clarke is sort of awful in this, with a one-note (i.e., blank-stared sullenness) performance devoid of any charisma whatsoever. To his credit, though, he takes it easy on the accent, so at least we're spared that.

I think it’s pretty unimpeachably a film of 2018, for what it’s worth: it entered into release for the first time this weekend.

It reminds me a little of Concussion: alright, but feeling like it’s pulled its hardest punches under some delusion of playing it fairly. Which was silly, because despite Byron Allen apparently refusing to embrace advertising the film to Fox News and whoever, the audience for this movie is always going to be crazy far-right old people first and foremost. I cannot recall a film I honestly felt so much trepidation over going to see: I knew it was made by a team of liberals and isn’t this crazy hit job, but I knew that necesarrily a huge portion of the audience going to see this wanted exactly that. It’s a bit of a hard sell regardless: one of the TV spots has a narrator say this is about how the Kennedys used fake news to cover things up, which is such nonsense. I’m glad they made the movie, because in the longrun it will probably mean there won’t be that crazy conservative conspiracy version of this movie.

Maybe because I had incorporated the tepid response here and elsewhere into my expectations, I was pleasantly surprised by Chappaquiddick; instead of treating the event as something about which there are hidden truths to uncover, it mostly presents what is publicly known at face value with minimal embellishment, and that adds up to more than enough of an indictment of Jason Clarke's Ted Kennedy. For example, I don't think the film leaves much doubt that Kopechne could possibly have been saved if those involved had acted responsibly, and if anything the script overemphasizes either Kennedy's regression to a child-like state or a fundamental mental incapacity - depending on how uncharitably one wants to read it - with its depictions of the senator diverting himself with kite-flying and cartoons in the face of stress.

I've seen the somber tone and steady pacing criticized elsewhere for lacking energy, but given that the perspective of the filmmakers seems sympathetic to Kennedy the character - a least favored son unable to establish himself outside of the accomplishments of his brothers and the ambitions of his father - while at the same time deeply critical of his behavior, it seems entirely appropriate that the film is infused not with peak-Oliver-Stone righteous anger but instead bitter disappointment. I'm in total disagreement about the above criticism of the lead performance: Clarke gets across exactly the right level of moral schizophrenia as a man who knows the right thing to do and also knows how the world he occupies really works, and can't commit himself fully to following one path or the other (either of which would have made his and his advisors lives much easier). To one of Brian C's other complaints, I don't think the film is about corruption on the legal, social, or political level, but very much a consideration of how self-interest, expectations, entitlement, and a sense of being committed to the greater good ("our cause", in the movie's words) contribute to personal corruption. As for the meetings with Joseph Kennedy's squad of fixers, I thought they were far from laid-back; the scene where Teddy is left by his father in a room in which new lawyers and consiglieres seem to be seeping from cracks in the walls and the cushions of furniture every minute was deeply unsettling while also illustrating just how incapable he is of "handling" a situation like this on his own.

In all, there may not be quite enough here to make this a great or even very good movie, and I'm sure it won't satisfy those looking for a ticking-clock political thriller, but as a portrait of a flawed man unable to find his way in a maelstrom of competing interests and values, it's perfectly satisfying (and features a supporting performance from Ed Helms that I enjoyed quite a bit, especially his final humiliation as he abets Kennedy's climactic spewing of the bullshit he tried to steer someone he views as a brother away from).

DarkImbecile wrote:(and features a supporting performance from Ed Helms that I enjoyed quite a bit, especially his final humiliation as he abets Kennedy's climactic spewing of the bullshit he tried to steer someone he views as a brother away from).

I actually spent a good part of the movie wondering just what his deal was. He's someone so close to the most prominent political family in the country that he's practically an adopted son - and a lawyer described as the family fixer no less! - and he gets the willies over Teddy wanting to go on TV to sand away some political rough edges? How the bleeding hell did that guy manage to keep his innocence about political showmanship up to that point?

Honestly, I thought he was the least convincing character in the film. Just imagine the secrets that guy must have known, and yet he's going to pull that babe-in-the-woods routine? If the part had been written and acted as a guy who, as the movie begins, had been growing increasingly jaded and cynical about all the family drama and this was the last straw, maybe I could buy it. But a guy in his position spending the whole movie getting the sads that a Kennedy might be less than an ideal human? Not buying it.

I think there's an entirely understandable gap between Joe Gargan being a guy who maybe has to clean up messes with mistresses and helps keep other unsavory things out of the public spotlight and being willing to overlook that your boss and friend killed a woman - a family friend, no less - and then repeatedly lied and refused to take responsibility for it. These are not equivalent things to "fix", and one might be willing to do the former for the family and "the cause" and entirely unwilling to do the latter. Saying "imagine the secrets that guy must have known" assumes that there are equivalent or worse secrets in Ted Kennedy's past - the film establishes that Gargan's not a part of Joseph Kennedy's circle, and he was probably too young (not even 40 during the events of the film) to have been deeply involved with JFK's presidency. I didn't have a problem with it dramatically or with any extratextual considerations.