John defends facts in ‘Chappaquiddick’
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‘Very compelling’
John Curran’s “Chappaquiddick,” which opens in theaters this weekend, is a dramatization of what happened late one night in 1969 when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) drove his car off a narrow bridge on Martha’s Vineyard, killing the passenger he was riding with, Mary Jo Kopechne.
Kennedy survived, but waited nine hours to report it to authorities, while the story of Kopechne, who had been a campaign worker on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, were often in the backdrop in the scandal that lingered for decades later.
Curran says that his movie is a “very nuanced and very compelling and very balanced” look at what happened, with key details based largely on the inquest that followed.
He defends the movie against criticism from some of Kennedy’s friends and from literary agent Esther Newberg, who complained to People that when she read the screenplay, she saw “one thing made up after another.” Newberg was among the group of RFK campaign workers, known as the “boiler room girls,” who had gathered for a house party reunion earlier that evening along with Kopechne and Kennedy.
“Really, Ted and Mary Jo are the only people who really know what happened on the bridge that night,” Curran tells Variety’s “PopPolitics” on SiriusXM. “The people like Esther, they have stuck to the inquest testimony, and we drew all of our information from the inquest, from their words.
He said that there are liberties with the dialog, like in any historical movie, but “in terms of the facts of the case and the decisions that were made by the boiler room girls, the brain trust around Ted, they are inarguable.”
Kennedy is played by Jason Clarke and Kopechne by Kate Mara, and the movie was shot in part at the actual location, Curran says.
He said that they “probably stretched the truth the most” regarding the relationship between Kennedy and his father, Joseph Kennedy Sr. (Bruce Dern), who was then incapacitated by a stroke. In the movie, Kennedy Sr. communicates his displeasure with the way that his son has handled the tragedy and urges him to pursue an “alibi.”
“He probably could say one word, and I believe it was ‘No,’” Curran says. But the movie reflects the expectations that the Kennedy patriarch placed on his sons even later in his life, Curran says. Kennedy Sr. died in 1969.
“I am a fan of Ted’s,” Curran says. “My generation, in terms of political titans, I believe he was on the right side of history, and I agree with a lot of the legislation he championed. But I realized I had a blind spot about this episode of his life.”
He said that it was a good time to tell the story because “history repeats itself. We are reaching that divisive point where people will support their party’s representatives, and be completely blind to the deficiencies of those people.”
Flaws
He adds, “I think it is very relevant. I think it is another example of the corruption of power, and using it to sort of band-aid over character flaws of a presidential candidate.”
Meanwhile, in our noisy, toxically divided, my-way-or-the-highway political culture, you’re on one side or the other, and there’s almost no middle ground left — no place where liberals and conservatives can overlap without feeling like they’re betraying their own cause. “Chappaquiddick,” the deep and gripping new docudrama about the tragic incident that took place on July 18, 1969, when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge and his passenger, Kopechne, died by drowning, is a more probing drama of corruption than any movie Hollywood has released in years. As I said in my review, it’s a movie made in the spirit of open-eyed — and, yes, liberal — inquiry. Yet is it a film that liberal moviegoers are ready to embrace? The critics have mostly been kind, but the tone of the media coverage has been cautious, reserved, a tad skeptical; the movie is going after a sacred cow. The irony is that “Chappaquiddick” is being celebrated in conservative media circles, because it paints a devastatingly critical portrait of Ted Kennedy, one of the icons of postwar American liberalism.
Conservative media tends to be mind-bending in its selectivity. It will rush to attack a Kennedy or a Clinton (or anyone who works in Hollywood), but it will never touch a Donald Trump or a Roy Moore. I’d like to think I speak for my fellow liberals when I say that I condemn that blinding level of hypocrisy. Yet the power of “Chappaquiddick” as a movie is that it’s not a “conservative” indictment of the Kennedy clan. It doesn’t attack Ted Kennedy’s politics; it says that he betrayed his politics — betrayed the progressive dream — by refusing, at a crucial moment, to live within the rule of law.
Conservatives can make hay out of that if they’d like, but the movie is really aimed at liberals. In laying out what happened at Chappaquiddick, and in the case of certain incidents what might have happened (the filmmakers are forced to speculate, since no one who was there is now alive), “Chappaquiddick” doesn’t just reenact a legendary political scandal from 50 years ago. It throws down a gauntlet to contemporary liberal culture. The events of Chappaquiddick cast a looming shadow over Ted Kennedy’s life and career (even though he went on to be one of our most diligent and ardent senators), and the film, in taking the measure of his dishonesty in 1969, asks: What is the legacy of dividing off the personal from the political?
There has been some carping about the film’s historical accuracy, though nothing that I’ve read questions the essential interpretation of history that it presents. The critic and author Neal Gabler, who is currently writing a biography of Edward Kennedy, published an editorial in The New York Times that damned the film for its alleged distortions. Yet apart from one word spoken in the movie by Joseph P. Kennedy, Gabler barely offers a specific example to back up his case.
Among the controversies: “Chappaquiddick” says that Kopechne did not immediately drown after the Oldsmobile that Kennedy was driving plunged off the short bridge to Chappaquiddick Island. The film asserts that after Kennedy left the scene, she was still alive and suffocated, within a slowly diminishing pocket of air, as the water gradually rose. It’s not possible to determine the definitive truth (or falsehood) of that scenario, because Kopechne was never given an autopsy. (Considering the gravity of the circumstances, that fact alone carries the whiff of scandal.) However, according to The Boston Globe, the film’s interpretation of the evidence squares with that of John Farrar, the diver who retrieved Kopechne and based what he said on the position of her body. (RTRS)
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