John Podhoretz at Weekly Standard
New movie approaches the grisly story non-ideologically.
"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.' ” . . .
. . . 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. . . .
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