By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Review of Chappaquiddick
For those who imagine that Chappaquiddick is where Ethel
and Norman Thayer’s Golden Pond flows into Hiawatha’s Gitche Gumee, a bit of modern
history. On July 18, 1969, driving from a night party at a site on
Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard, U.S. Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy
(D-Mass.) made a wrong turn and went onto a rickety bridge without a railing. His
car tipped over and fell into water. He escaped but Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, one
of the “boiler room girls” at the party who had been idealistic workers for the 1968 campaign of Ted’s brother, Robert
F. Kennedy, died (she probably suffocated after exhausting an air bubble). Ted, athletic but alcoholic, had been
drinking.
Chappaquiddick, huffing along like a tabloid news bulletin arriving half
a century late, crams proven, likely and suspect facts and factoids into a lurid
cartoon of criminal negligence and character collapse. It indicts Ted Kennedy as
a callow, shallow man-boy of 37, dazed more by his legacy and three dead
brothers than by his shock from the tragic accident. That he suffered shock, panicked,
failed to report the accident for hours, and fell into the rough arms of a Kennedy
rescue team for protection and media massage, is certain. But the factuals get
very spongey in this film, which has the aroma of a calculated smear. At the
end, I almost expected this credit: historical research by Bill O’Reilly and
Steve Bannon.
Ted (modest look-alike Jason Clarke, working hard) is
shifty-eyed and unhappy even before the accident, disturbed by talk of his
inevitable Presidency. The creeping implication is that, feeling inadequate, he
had a death wish for his “destiny,” and poor Kopechne was collateral damage. Ted’s
choices on the grim night remain sticky and murky. In this hard-breathing rumor
rummage of speculation, he ignores advice, fumbles alibis, fondles a football,
straps on a neck brace, even flies a kite. He almost seems like a Kennedy pretender,
imitating Nixon’s flop-sweat disaster in the first 1960 debate against JFK.
The family’s elite rescue squad (Robert McNamara, Ted
Sorensen, etc.) swoops in as a cynical Irish
Mafia, like a pirate crew recruited from every anti-Kennedy fantasy of the toxic
right. The senator turns to his dad Joseph who, though half-dead from a stroke,
slaps him and snarls. Mother Rose is never seen, and Ted’s wife Joan has one
line, the eloquent “Go fuck yourself, Teddy.” Loyal cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms)
serves as the prod of Ted’s squishy conscience, and for his pains is humiliated:
made to hold the cue cards for Kennedy’s TV speech.
The most memorable Kennedy is the patriarch, death
gargoyle Joe. The eyes of veteran pro Bruce Dern, 81, haven’t blazed quite like
this since he shot John Wayne in The
Cowboys (Ted even gets snarked for attempting “John Wayne shit”). Director
John Curran could handle a cholera epidemic in The Painted Veil, but this leering slum-along makes him look like a
hack. Private, two-person conversations are re-imagined, and most of the
suspense tactics are like vintage agit-prop, defamation drones launched by witers
Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan. Their film is a crude gift for all the never-forgivers
who don’t care to know that Ted Kennedy, despite alcoholism, became a great senator,
father of major legislation like the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He lived
until 2009 under a triple shadow: JFK, RFK and MJK (Mary Jo Kopechne). Dubious
and mean-spirited, Chappaquiddick is a
sniper on a knoll made of old National
Enquirers.
SALAD (A List)
Twelve Strong Movies Set in New
England:
Captains Courageous (director Victor Fleming, 1937),
The Devil and Daniel Webster (William Dieterle, 1941), The Stranger (Orson Welles, 1946), All That Heaven Allows (Douglas Sirk, 1955), The Trouble With Harry (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958), The Devil’s Disciple (Guy Hamilton,
1959), Long Day’s Journey Into Night
(Sidney Lumet, 1962), The Friends of
Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973), The
Verdict (Sidney Lumet, 1982), Ethan
Frome (John Madden, 1993), The
Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006) and Spotlight
(Tom McCarthy, 2015). Photo above; Rock Hudson, Jane Wyman and deer in All That Heaven Allows.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
Though
a friend of sorts with Charlie Chaplin, in the great Chaplin vs. Keaton debate
Orson Welles was in Buster’s camp: “You’ve got to separate jokes from beauty.
Chaplin had too much beauty, drenched his pictures with it. That’s why Keaton
is finally giving him the bath and will, historically, forever. Oh yes, he’s so
much greater … more versatile, more finally original. Some of the things that
Keaton thought up to do are incredible,” (The debate will never end. Quote from
My Lunches With Orson: Conversations
between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Playing
the sybaritic seeker Marcello in La Dolce
Vita changed Marcello Mastroianni’s image, career and even view of himself.
He was grateful, except for the new Latin Lover image, upset that “producers
wished him to play men who were ‘somehow always slithering across the rug
toward some beautiful woman.’ Fighting back, he became impotent in Il Bel Antonio, a cuckold in Divorce Italian Style, a myopic radical
in The Organizer, a comically deluded
monarch in Henry IV.” From the
Mastroianni/La Dolce Vita chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Suave,
Sicilian Cefalu (Marcello Mastroianni) is not thrilled by his slightly
moustached wife Rosalia (Daniella Rocca) in Divorce
Italian Style (Janus Films, 1962; director Pietro Germi, cinematographers
Leonida Barboni, Carlo Di Palma).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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