Film Review: ‘Chappaquiddick’ Is a Dive into the Sickness of Entitlement

For anyone worried about the future under the leadership of the millennial generation, take heart: there is hope.

The new film “Chappaquiddick”, detailing Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1969 Martha’s Vineyard car accident that led to the death of a young woman he left at the scene to drown, proves it.

At a Thursday night screening of the film in Washington, D.C., Executive Producer Mark Ciardi was on hand and took questions following the viewing from a room full of writers and journalists — and very probably a room full of people not forgiving of the events of that fateful weekend just before Kennedy’s brother landed men on the moon (which is a key plot element in the film).

Ciardi said that the screenwriters were two young men in their late 20s, early 30s who had never heard the Chappaquiddick story but were intrigued when they heard it mentioned by Bill Maher as a defining moment in American politics.

The production notes go further:

Screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, who both grew up in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, had a strong emotional connection to the Kennedy family, long before their 2015 screenplay landed on the Blacklist. Living there, the tragedy in Dealey Plaza was impossible to ignore and it sowed a lifelong curiosity about the Kennedys’ Camelot.  However, neither had ever heard about CHAPPAQUIDDICK.

While watching Real Time with Bill Maher in 2008 Hillary Clinton had just lost to Barrack Obama and Bill commented that it was because of Ted Kennedy’s endorsements of Barrack Obama that he unexpectedly beat Hillary for the nomination and then what he said next, instinctually just grabbed us: Ted Kennedy has changed presidential history because, if hadn’t been for Chappaquiddick, he would have been president in 1972 and it changed the course of presidential history.

Taylor was 28 and knew he was a pretty smart guy and well educated. How could something seemingly so important, been absent from the conversations about the Kennedys.

The more we learned, the more this story unfolded with layers of intrigue, and the implications were wide ranging.

And the story they tell is a subtle examination of a very privileged man-child, lost somewhere in the shadows of his older brothers. (Joe Jr. was the favorite, Jack was the charming one, Bobby was the brilliant one, Teddy tells his monstrous, dying father Joe as he tries to reassure the patiarch he can handle the situation of the girl he left to die.)

There’s not an anachronistic moment in the film — everything is meticulously recreated, right down to the awkward dancing of the very uppercrust, regatta sailing WASPS of the late 1960s as they enjoy a reunion of sorts of those who had worked on the recently deceased Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, cut short as it was by an assassin’s bullet.

At the party are former secretaries of Bobbys, known as “The Boiler Room Girls”, and as dedicated to the Kennedy family as the nation was at the time. And among them is the brilliant, and perhaps a little broken by the cynicism of politics, Mary Jo Kopechne.

The events that follow are told with a firm yet sensitive hand — something Teddy Kennedy could have used from his own father — so that Mary Jo’s death is presented for what it was: a likely suffocation. She is thought to have survived for hours trapped in an air pocket, while Teddy ran around town formulating an alibi and asking everyone else to clean up his mess.

A great deal of credit should be given Australian actor Jason Clark for masterfully managing to make Teddy both bumbling and foolish, and then arrogant and bullying in the next breath, most especially to his cousin Joe Gargan. Joe, who was more a brother to the Kennedy boys, is also the entitled Teddys fetch-it boy, who tries valiantly to be the moral compass Teddy claims he has, but ends up being the holder of the cue cards to the national speech Kennedy gives wherein he plays the victim of Chappaquiddick.

Gargan broke ties with the Kennedy family following the events at Chappaquiddick. Kennedy, as we know, became “The Lion of the Senate.”

And burgeoning millennial screenwriters never knew of the death of a brilliant young lady called Mary Jo.

But those young screenwriters put a line in the film toward the end that summarizes the entitlement of a man raised to the purple, who could somehow rationalize the death of a young woman — who may have been saved had he not broken down like a child in despair upon realizing what he had done — and that say that the upcoming generation understands a Teddy Kennedy.

From the mouth of Gargan, pleading with Kennedy to resign during his live television appearance, the words, “This is not about opportunity, it’s about integrity.”

Kennedy was unconvinced. But the makers of Chappaquiddick were not. Their film has more of the latter.

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