Chappaquiddick: Chinatown in Real Life (MINOR SPOILERS)

I'll likely have trouble keeping the spelling right through this post. I think maybe I'll call this "the Ted Kennedy movie."

SPOILER ALERT: The bad guy wins. And wins again. And keeps on winning.

Indeed, the movie that most came to my mind watching this film was "Chinatown." As par for the "biopic" type movie, we can't know that ALL the lines and scenes in the Ted Kennedy movie are "what really happened," but there is enough that clearly DID happen that the movie makes its point with growing power as it goes along: not only do the people who run the country get away with terrible things, they THRIVE after doing them. Forget it, Jake. Its Chinatown.

The summer of 1969 was pretty wild, I now remember. As this movie points out, Teddy had the luck of sinking the car with Mary Jo Kopechne in it just ahead of the landing of the men on the moon(which, the movie is at pains to remind, was the culmination of a challenge by Teddy's brother Jack that a man would be on the moon by the end of the decade.) The movie has no reason to get into it, but with Apollo and Chappaquidick in July, Sharon Tate was murdered the next month, in August. And "at the movies," my young self had begun a summer-long quest to get to see "The Wild Bunch," which seemed to encapsulate the violence of the times as it peaked.

The movie takes up the spoiled sense of privilege that Teddy had at the time. His "top lawyers" are often relegated to gofer status on his whim("You'll be real good holding my cue cards") and after telling his aides "I'll handle it" about reporting the sunken car to the cops, Teddy doesn't and then yells at his aides the next day: "When the cops didn't show up last night, you should have known it was YOUR responsibility to call them."

And this: when the "Boiler Room girls" are told that one of their number, Mary Jo, has drowned in Teddy's car, the most political of them pipes up "What do you need us to do to help the Senator?"

The film makes the point that not only are our most famous political families spoiled with privilege, they have both "true believers" who will do anything for them...and adoring voters who will allow them anything. Teddy got elected after Chappaquidick, again, and again, and again. And he even tried for the Presidency once(in 1980, challenging Carter in the primary, wounding Carter, helping Reagan win.)

This is a well-made, well-written film that makes a daring decision: to play much of the film as a COMEDY. I'm reminded, quite frankly, of the movie I saw last week -- The Death of Stalin -- where a bunch of powerful men show up to cover up the grim realities of death in order to "pull one over" on the public. The comedy is played out in Teddy's stupid antics(like deciding to wear his neck brace to Mary Jo's funeral) and his team's efforts to stop him(tackling him and trying to pull the neck brace off, in a slapstick sequence.)

And it IS a bunch of men who show up to help Teddy. His own two close lawyers are "small fish"(one is a cousin, played by funnyman Ed Helms as the one man with a conscience in the film). But Papa Joe Kennedy sends for the Big Guys -- a roomful of Top Dogs, led by Robert MacNamera (Clancy Brown) who proceed to take over and bully Teddy into doing everything he can to "put this matter"(the dead girl) behind us."

The "Me Too" aspect of the story, circa 1969, is how a smoke-filled room of middle-aged men move so quickly to save a younger one of their number from responsibility for the death of a young woman. But then the writers throw in that shiv in which the surviving women join the cover-up, too. Oh, well, that's reality.

Papa Joe Kennedy -- portrayed as barely able to speak and confined to a wheelchair after a stroke -- is played by Bruce Dern, the young star of Hitchcock's Family Plot, Black Sunday, and Silent Running so many years ago, and now in a heyday as "a grand old man of cinema" who has been on screen since the early sixties and now still works(in prestige movies like The Hateful Eight and Nebraska) when his old pals Jack Nicholson and Gene Hackman are long gone from the screen. Funny thing: in movies like "Family Plot," Dern could be charming -- he had a great lanky gait and a kind of leering good ol'boy grin -- but now, Dern favors playing up only his rodentoid meanness. Joe Kennedy, even incapacitated, is MEAN, and unforgiving.

Dern's first scene is only as a voice, on the phone, after Teddy calls Daddy FIRST to tell him about the girl in the pond being dead. All we hear on the other end of the line is breathing, then angry wheezing, then sputtering, then one choked out word from Dern: "Alibi!"

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