Is there a mass audience for Chappaquiddick? John Curran’s new drama about the 1969 scandal involving Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy opened April 6 on 1,560 screens across the U.S. but so far has grossed only $11.8 million and appears to be fading at the box office. Actor Jason Clarke, who plays Kennedy in the movie, has publicly lamented its shutout from such liberal TV programs as The Rachel Maddow Show and Real Time With Bill Maher. At the same time, Curran turned down an interview request from Sean Hannity of Fox News, telling Indiewire, “I’m not embracing the right. They’re going to embrace this film anyway, see it through their own prism. I could have picked a film that’s a lot easier to market.” Here in Chicago the movie opened with a flood of TV spots but no press previews, a common strategy for such conservative fare as biblical or military dramas; I was surprised to learn that the filmmakers of Chappaquiddick were liberal.
“I was afraid,” Kennedy wrote 40 years later in his memoir True Compass, published shortly before he died of cancer. “I was overwhelmed. I made terrible decisions. Even though I was dazed from my concussion, exhaustion, shock, and panic, I was rational enough to understand that the accident would be devastating to my family.” His final account of the accident is humble and remorseful, but he has nothing to say about the days that followed, when Kennedy family wise men and fixers gathered around him to manage the fallout and preserve his brothers’ political legacy. By Saturday afternoon, Teddy is back at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, conferring with a ten-man war room that includes JFK’s former speechwriter Ted Sorenson (Taylor Nichols) and secretary of defense, Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown). “Well, Bob, you handled the Cuban missile crisis,” cracks Sorenson. “Let’s see what you can do with this one.”
Directed by John Curran, PG-13, 109 min.
