Chappaquiddick

In John Curran's Chappaquiddick, Sen. Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) is portrayed as the whipping boy of the Kennedy clan, who did absolutely everything wrong after driving off a bridge on Martha's Vineyard and leaving a devoted campaign worker (Kate Mara) to drown. As portrayed by the masterful Mr. Clarke, Kennedy is at once despicable and pitiful, but certainly no more callous than the stable of power brokers and spinmeisters who had been doing the palsied and indomitable Joe Kennedy's (Bruce Dern) bidding for years and are called to save the senator from himself. The screenplay by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan is smart and confines the story to the week after the accident, which, coincidentally was the time of the first moon walk -- the time of one Kennedy's posthumous space age triumph and his youngest brother's near implosion.