‘Chappaquiddick’ on Netflix: Imagine ‘The Godfather’ Only Now Fredo Is The Bad Guy

Like much of America, Hollywood has long had a love affair with the Kennedys. It’s not hard to see why. John F. Kennedy was, after all, a president straight out of central casting, winning over the country with his soaring rhetoric and matinee idol good looks.

From PT 109 (1963) to JFK (1991), movies have aided and abetted the creation of the Kennedy myth, elevating both JFK and his brother Robert, both of whom were assassinated in the prime of their careers, as martyrs to a lost American ideal.

Even Chappaquiddick (2017), John Curran’s docudrama about the 1969 scandal that nearly ended the political career of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the family’s four brothers, falls prey to these hagiographic tendencies, despite trying to seriously grapple with the deeply flawed man at its center.

Now available to stream on Netflix, the film methodically recounts the events leading up to, and aftermath of, the accident that took place on July 18, 1969, unfolding like a police procedural–only from the perspective of a man trying to mislead both the police and, ultimately, the public.

Attending a party on Martha’s Vineyard roughly a year after RFK’s death, Kennedy (Jason Clarke) and political aide Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) leave for a moonlight ride in the senator’s Oldsmobile. Things go awry when a drunken Kennedy loses control of the car, which careens off a bridge and into a nearby creek.

Somehow Kennedy manages to escape, leaving Kopechne trapped in the submerged auto. The scenes immediately following the crash are among the best in the film, haphazardly reconstructing the event in flashbacks and underlining Kennedy’s strange lack of urgency in reporting the accident to the police (he waited nearly 10 hours to do so).

Instead, he finds his way back to his hotel room, calls his stroke-ridden father (Bruce Dern) for advice and takes a bath before going to bed. In one of the film’s most haunting images, Curran intercuts scenes of Kennedy slowly sinking into the tub with footage of Mary Jo gasping for air as the car fills up with water.

The next morning, Kennedy’s friends Joe Gargan and Paul Markham (Ed Helms and Jim Gaffigan, both excellent in rare dramatic roles) are shocked find the senator obliviously eating breakfast with some fellow hotel guests, just as the police recover his wrecked car —and the dead body inside— from the creek.

While it suffers from many of the same maladies (clunky dialogue, heavy-handed symbolism, underdeveloped characters), Chappaquiddick is not your typical prestige flick. Instead, Curran channels his inner David Fincher, focusing obsessively on the known facts of the incident that Kennedy and his advisers later try to manipulate in their favor in order save his political future.

The “coverup” portion of Chappaquiddick proves much less exciting than the crime itself, not least because history has already spoiled the ending: Kennedy remarkably survived the scandal, easily winning a second term in 1970 and serving in the Senate until his death in 2009.

But it does give Jason Clarke the opportunity to sink his teeth into a juicy lead role. Clarke’s Kennedy is at once arrogant and vulnerable, repugnant and sympathetic– a man determined to take charge of his own affairs yet unable to escape the long shadow cast by his revered older brothers and his domineering father.

Indeed, as Pablo Carrain’s Jackie (2016) does for the former first lady, Chappaquiddick does for Ted Kennedy, exposing the gulf between the senator’s brash, confident public persona and his private doubt and uncertainty. These two sides of Kennedy converge in the final scene depicting his famous nationally televised statement on July 25, 1969, in which he feigns remorse for millions of Americans but clearly no longer feels it in his heart.

“Joey, you have flaws. We all do,” Kennedy tells Joe Gargan in one of the film’s best exchanges. “Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. I have Chappaquiddick.”

“Yeah Moses had a temper,” Gargan retorts. “But he never left a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea.”

Unfortunately, Chappaquiddick also mistakenly portrays Ted (and to a lesser extent his father) the fall guy for virtually all of the Kennedy clan’s sins: He’s the brother who just couldn’t live up to expectations, the one who publicly embarrassed his family and the one who most visibly abused his power.

By contrast, the script by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan never questions the saintly legacies of JFK and RFK, whose own indiscretions as both public officials and private individuals are already well-documented. At times, Chappaquiddick recalls an alternate version of The Godfather that casts Fredo as the bad guy, while absolving the rest of the Corleone family from blame.

That’s not to say the Kennedys are criminals (relax, MSNBC; sorry, Fox News), but rather that they are complicated historical figures who deserve to be treated as such, both on screen and off. No cinematic representation of the Kennedys has yet achieved this balance, although some have endeavored to tell the other side of the story (most notably Larry Cohen’s The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover).

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” advises the cynical newspaperman at the end of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). With the Kennedys, Hollywood has been printing the legend for nearly six decades. The jury’s still out on whether Chappaquiddick heralds the end of this trend, or simply the latest iteration of it.

Matthew Housiaux covers the White House for The Kiplinger Letter in Washington, DC. On the side, he enjoys reading about history and blogging about movies at his website Nouvelle Vague.

Where to stream Chappaquiddick