The Senator review – an easy ride for Ted Kennedy
Jason Clarke as Ted Kennedy in The Senator. Photograph: Claire Folger/Signature Entertainment
“I learned a great lesson from Chappaquiddick … don’t drive over narrow bridges when you’re pissed out of your mind.” This gag from the BBC’s 1970s sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News, with Griff Rhys Jones playing a sombre Ted Kennedy, perfectly encapsulates his cynicism and self-pity. It seems to me more apposite than
this lenient movie about Chappaquiddick, which now belatedly appears in the UK, starring Jason Clarke as Kennedy, scripted by first-time feature writers Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, and directed by John Curran.
While driving back in darkness from a party at Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts in July 1969, Kennedy’s car went off a narrow bridge into the water. Kennedy swam clear, but his passenger drowned: Mary Jo Kopechne, a woman who had worked as a researcher for his late brother Bobby. Having failed to report the incident for eight hours and toyed with the idea of claiming Mary Jo was driving, Kennedy finally admitted to leaving the scene of an accident, accepted a suspended two-year sentence and gave a televised address claiming he hadn’t been drinking and there was no impropriety with Kopechne. The US had no great appetite for spoiling the moon-landing euphoria with a political scandal, or spoiling the tragic Kennedy mystique . So the media and political classes suppressed their distaste and embarrassment, allowing Kennedy to plough on with his long but undistinguished senatorial career and a failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980.
