The Truth About Ted
Director John Curran and screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan tell the story of Ted Kennedy's infamous 1969 car crash that kept him from the White House and left Mary Jo Kopechne dead in their aptly titled Chappaquiddick. Australian actor Jason Clarke plays the senator with incredible depth and sympathy, given the often unsympathetic actions he takes following the accident, and is surrounded by a talented ensemble that embody the various forces of moral and legal ambiguity around Kennedy at the time. Allen and Logan have said that their aim with this film was to deliver the story as truthfully as possible, even when the realities didn't make for the cleanest dramatic choices. The result is a film that doesn't quite satisfy, but is nonetheless a model for political films.
When the credits rolled on Chappaquiddick, I was left with lingering questions about what took place during the accident, and about what Ted Kennedy's choices in the immediate aftermath said about him as a man, let alone one with such an otherwise impressive legacy. The film feels unsatisfactory here because the real story is too. We don't know the exact nature of Ted's relationship with Mary Jo; we don't know how he escaped the submerged car and whether or not he really tried to get Mary Jo out.
What we do know is that something terrible happened as a result of Ted's drunk driving, and that he made moves to conceal certain things about that event. How much he even understands what really happened is unclear. What we’re left with is a film that refuses to invent narrative contrivances that would make its story clean and satisfying.
The film does provide some possible reasoning for Ted’s actions, but there’s nothing clean-cut. Ted is depicted as conflicted. There are no great overtures about his inexperience, but it’s clear that with his three older brothers and mentors dead, the spotlight is on him, and he’s a deer in the headlights, even before the accident. The filmmakers don’t tell you whether anything Ted does is right or wrong, but Clarke’s performance does tell us that Ted wasn’t equipped to handle this moment. At one point, Ted tells his father, who can barely speak or move as the result of multiple strokes, that he wants to be a great man, but he just doesn't know who he is yet. In return for that honesty, his father slaps him. The filmmakers don't attempt to make Joe Kennedy, Sr. an excuse for his son's actions, but there's no doubt he was a corrupting influence.
Though the film doesn’t feel fulfilling given all that is unknown about the incident, it does linger, because it forces you to consider your own judgement of Kennedy and his actions. The film’s staying power is in forcing its audience to thoughtfully fill in the gaps. Most movies that stick with me in the hours or days after I’ve seen them usually do so because of the filmmaking choices I either loved, hated or was perplexed by. In this case, I was more enamored with the true story itself. The film hints at answers to lingering questions, but it doesn't get lost in unsolved mysteries. It may not be dynamite filmmaking, but the filmmakers know their true story will bolster the plain approach they take.
I think Chappaquiddick can serve as a template for our political storytelling moving forward. I have no doubt that the filmmakers are most interested in getting the story right, rather than telling what they think should be the right story. Storytelling can bridge the partisan divide when it focuses on facts and humanity. We don’t need to be lied to to root for someone. Even though I knew how Chappaquiddick ended, I continually rooted for Ted to do the right thing. I understood that the film had no heroes or villains, just protagonists and antagonists.
There are great political movies that play with the truth, but it's a needle that can't be threaded without upsetting historians, partisans, or both. Oliver Stone’s Nixon is a movie that I love, but knowing both Stone’s penchant for filling in the gaps of history and the unanswered questions around Nixon himself, the film can’t be fully truthful. I think it achieves emotional truth in conveying who Nixon was as a man, but doesn’t always provide factual truth.* I do think, however, that this is a valid artistic approach, especially in dealing with someone so seemingly unsympathetic as Richard Nixon.
Chappaquiddick, in dealing with such a murky event with a liberal icon at its center, doesn’t have the luxury of being too loose with the facts. If it creates a false reason for Kennedy to have failed to do the right thing, it would be a liberal lionization of a flawed man. If it depicted him as purely cold and conniving, it would be dismissed as a conservative hit piece. Instead, the film presents everything in a very straightforward manner, and whatever greater emotional truth is imparted by the artists is done so sparingly and through subtext. It’s in the look on Ted’s face as he practically sleepwalks through the rest of the night after the accident. It’s in his reaction to his father’s insistence on covering everything up. Ted doesn’t get a dramatic, redemptive confession. It’s up to us as the audience to decide what we think of the man, and that’s exactly the right move for this film to make.
Chappaquiddick won’t spoon feed you sentiment. It may not connect as deeply because of that, but I think it’s a film that will endure, because it won’t ever be on the wrong the side of history; it is history.
*This is something I’ve written about before in my review of Steve Jobs, which very clearly took liberties with actual events, but I think managed to express something real about the man Jobs was and who he would become over time.