Chappaquiddick
Initial release: April 6, 2018 (USA) Director: John Curran
Box office: 16.6 million USD
Producers: Mark Ciardi, Chris Cowles, Chris Fenton, Campbell G. McInnes
Executive producers: Byron Allen, Jennifer Lucas, Taylor Allen
The following is a review of the movie “Chappaquiddick”
by Marc Primo.
If you’re looking for all-in-one suspense, thriller, drama, mystery, and tragedy storyline that promises to keep you hooked until the very end, then Chappaquiddick is your answer.
Directed by John Curran, this engrossing plot centers around the tragic incident involving a married Senator Ted Kennedy taking a late night drive with one of his brother's young, unmarried campaign staffers, Mary Jo Kopechne. They had just left a party together, and as they went on, their car drove off the side of a bridge in Martha's Vineyard. Senator Kennedy survived. The young lady drowned beneath the waters. Instead of reporting the incident immediately, he fled the scene and only reported being there ten hours later when police investigations were getting underway.
The next day the political machinery of the influential Kennedy family went into overdrive in efforts to prevent any damage to the family in the eyes of the public. The film seeks to delve into the murky world of political scandal management, and it does so without unnecessary sensationalism but still manages to pull no punches about the grim incident.
In the attempts to save Ted Kennedy from the repercussions of the incident and to save his political career, everything possible in political power was done to make it look like the right actions had been taken. The film explores the real-life accounts of the lives of one of the biggest and at one point in history, the strongest political family in America. Through revisiting the grim event that happened in the 1960s, the film furnishes reasons that led Ted Kennedy never to become the president. The incident represented a prime example of abuse of political privilege and haunted the late Ted Kennedy's political career to the end. The leading role of Ted Kennedy is pulled off with a lot of nerve by an impressive Jason Clarke, and the film manages to fulfill Curran's apparent aim of exposing the moral rot and behind-the-scenes callousness that the Kennedy family strove to hide from the public eye.
Chappaquiddick eventually paints the scary picture of how deeply rooted and widespread the reach of political power is. The exciting history of the Kennedy family will hold your attention and emotions until the very end.
