Ever stop and think about the incident at the heart of this movie? Really deeply think about it?
And just how do you be fair to someone for doing something he himself described as "indefensible"?
Well, you don't judge, you tell a story, and in doing so you center the story on that man and show rather than tell his thoughts, perhaps subtextually hearkening back to Patricia Highsmith's non-grammatical but brilliant insight she placed on the lips of the sociopathic Thomas Ripley: "You never meet anybody who thinks they're a bad person."
Chappaquiddick does the nearly impossible and presents a non-judgmental portrait of a selfish but somehow pathetic man who did a series of terrible things, and in so doing stays close to both the facts as known, and likely grants us the closest we'll ever come to being inside Ted Kennedy's mind and inner circle after his reckless behavior and subsequent irresponsibility caused another person to die a death almost too horrible to contemplate.
This is a quiet, fascinating, factual, intrinsically disturbing film that gets to the center of a crime (a better description than "accident") more clearly than Joyce Carol Oates' sensationalized Black Water did in the nineties, and now replaces that novel as what my thoughts dwell on when I think of the negligent homicide that befell Mary Jo Kopechne.
As I was watching this film I also thought of how I actually met Ted Kennedy at a Democrat fund raising event when I was a small child, and he reached down and shook my hand. It strikes me now with an almost morbid intensity that...I'd once been touched by a man who left someone behind in a submerged car where she, as we now know, spent possibly five hours slowly suffocating to death while Kennedy looked out for himself and his interests.
Yes, Senator Kennedy got one thing right, his actions that summer night in 1969 were indefensible.
8 out of 10, which is about as high as a movie like this can reasonably be expected to be rated.
I've been meaning to see this one. Glad to heat that it is so well done!