American senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy is one of the champions of the left. The Democrat, the youngest of the nine famous Kennedy siblings, held public office for the state of Massachusetts from 1962 to his death in 2009, and is credited with introducing legislation on civil rights, healthcare, immigration and education, among other things.
THE INCIDENT
In 1969, seven years after his brother the then-president John Fitzgerald was assassinated in Dallas, and just a year after his other brother Robert was shot dead during his own presidential campaign, Ted Kennedy was being encouraged to aim for the White House himself. It was then that a terrible incident occurred that was to convince the senator that his family was indeed cursed, as was speculated in the press. In the early hours of 19th of July, Kennedy’s car crashed off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts and was submerged in deep water. Kennedy escaped, but his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne drowned.
POLITICAL ROYALTY
Filmmaker John Curran was gripped by the messy aftermath of Chappaquiddick, which effectively ended Ted Kennedy’s presidential ambitions. A great admirer of the senator but aware of the controversy that still surrounds the case, Curran was determined to re-examine it and present it in all its complexity. In the film, he avoids political scenes and the mythology surrounding the Kennedys, focusing instead on the senator in his family home. It is a place where, under the patriarchal thumb of his elderly yet still uncompromising father Joseph Kennedy (played by Bruce Dern), family politics are just as cutthroat as partisan politics in Congress.
Critics overwhelmingly applauded the film, and acknowledged the difficulty of bringing it to the screen. In the States, the controversial incident is still brought up by Republicans in Congress to undermine the moral values of the Democratic Party, which Kennedy represented until his death in 2009. Some media, though, felt the film had arrived too late to be important: Vulture called it “[a] movie that could never be made while its subject was alive, which ... is the only reason it was worth making”. The Wall Street Journal felt that the film lacked coherence, calling it “unsatisfyingly vague”. However, most reviews praised its attempt to be as transparent as possible, even if this revealed contradictions. The Washington Post found the film’s ambiguity “admirable”. Variety called it “a tense, scrupulous, absorbingly precise and authentic piece of history”, while Rolling Stone revelled in the way Kennedy’s political legacy descended “into a complex moral free fall”.
TED IN CONTEXT
In a presentation for the movie, Curran says that he felt it important to place Ted Kennedy in personal and historical context, taking account of what happened before the accident to provide clues as to the way the senator acted after it:
John Curran (American accent): I was trying to get to the human at the heart of the story. And really trying to figure out what Ted was going through at that point in his life. In the beginning of the film we meet somebody who’s still reeling from a tragedy. It was only a year before this story took place that his brother [Bobby] was assassinated, and everyone in America expected Ted to step into his shoes and run for president in 72.
THE DILEMMA
The incident exploded in the media, where conspiracy theories proliferated. Curran captured the real life coverage by placing archival news footage and newspaper headlines in the film. Meanwhile, indoors, an overwhelmed Kennedy receives advice from a whole team of lawyers employed by his father. The confusion and pressure was important to show, says Curran.
John Curran: In America these films are very divisive, any film about a politician... and our intention was to try to make a very non-partisan film, telling the story straight and letting people figure out for themselves how they felt about his character. The film goes back and you see the incident from a number of different perspectives, because his story kept changing; and really it’s about an evolving narrative. And by the end I think the film should provoke as many questions as it does supply answers. It certainly kicked a hornet’s nest in America. It provoked a lot of debate.
ARROGANCE
Australian actor Jason Clarke plays Ted Kennedy with a mix of statesmanlike integrity and naive arrogance. The aim was to present a flawed human being who was still a great politician, as Clarke explains:
Jason Clarke (Australian accent): Ted did something, which is hard to forgive —if it’s forgivable. But then, that’s human and that’s life and he lived on and his legislative record stands the test of time. What he stood for is on the right side of history: education, civil rights... so many things.
TRAGIC LOSS
While Kennedy became the focus of the tragedy, justice has not been done to the real victim: Mary Jo Kopechne. The actress Kate Mara welcomed the opportunity to reclaim Kopechne’s reputation and emphasise the tragedy of her death.
Kate Mara (American accent): I’m really proud to be showing a very small glimpse of her life. I think she has been treated unfairly in the past, with [by] the press and the way she was portrayed after her death, so I’m happy to tell part of her story.
A FAILURE
Another overlooked figure made prominent in the film is the lawyer Joe Gargan, a cousin of the Kennedys who had a close relationship with Ted. As Ed Helms, the actor who plays Gargan, explains, the role gave him uncomfortable insights into Kennedy’s character.
Ed Helms (American accent): It challenged my own perceptions of the Kennedy family. It’s also about some really bad judgment in the aftermath of a tragic accident, and judgment that’s born out of a reflex for self-preservation, which I think is something that’s very human, but there are times when we really have to transcend our base instincts and do the right thing. It appears Ted really failed to do that.
tragic saga
The Kennedy family are like political royalty in the US. Yet the nine siblings suffered much tragedy: Ted’s sister Rosemary was incapacitated by a non-consensual lobotomy. Joseph Jr. died in the war. Kathleen died in a plane crash. John and Robert were assassinated. In 1964, Ted himself was seriously injured in another plane crash. Kopechne, who was one of the campaign workers for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign, was trapped in the car for around eight hours. Ted Kennedy, who had been drinking, left the scene, and only reported it in the morning. While he claimed to have tried repeatedly to rescue the twenty-eight-year-old, the senator’s failure to report the incident immediately, and his conflicting accounts of it later, placed him under suspicion. The incident was to end his presidential aspirations, although many in America still see him as having used his status and family name to get away withmanslaughter. Ted’s reference to a Kennedy curse, however, continues to resonate as further tragedies occurred: in 1999, for example, John F. Kennedy’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife and his sister-in-law were all killed in yet another plane crash off the Massachusetts coastline. Kennedy Jr. was piloting.