On Friday, July 18, 1969, Senator Edward Kennedy hosted a cookout party on Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha’s Vineyard, in connection with two big events–the Edgarton Yacht Club Regatta, a sailboat race in which Kennedy competed, and the lunar landing and first moon walk, which took place on July 20th. Kennedy’s guests included six young women, the ‘Boiler Room girls,’ who had been part of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign staff. One of the women was 28 year old Mary Jo Kopechne, who the Senator was trying to hire for his campaign staff for a possible run at the Presidency in 1972. Around 11:15, Kopechne asked Kennedy if he would take her back to her hotel in Edgarton. Kennedy agreed to do so, and later testified that he decided to drive her himself, as his chauffeur was enjoying the party. The car went off a wooden bridge, Dike Bridge, which had no guardrails, and landed top down in Poucha Pond, which the bridge spans. Somehow Kennedy was able to get out of the car and swim to shore. Kopechne died in the vehicle, though she survived the initial crash, and lived for up to an hour after, her head in a small air bubble.

Chappaquiddick is a new film covering essentially the events of that night and the week afterwards, as Kennedy and his team of lawyers, managers, and Kennedy hangers-on tried to cope with the aftermath of this tragedy. Ted Kennedy is played by Jason Clarke, and Kopechne, by Kate Mara. Both are superb. Of course the very word Chappaquiddick is, today, synonymous with scandal. There remain many unanswered questions about what happened, what Kennedy did immediately after the accident and subsequently, and why he didn’t report the incident to the police until the next morning. And, of course, the incident has given rise to a wide range of conspiracy theories and accusations. I saw one this morning at the grocery store, a tabloid asserting that Kopechne was pregnant at the time of her death, and that she told Kennedy that he was the father of her child that evening. (Not true).

When I saw the first trailers for this film, my thought was that it was likely another right wing hit job. It’s not; not even remotely. In fact, the screenwriters, Taylor Allen and Robert Logan, and the director, John Curran, went out of their way to confine their story to what is known, based largely on testimony from the inquest, and also from other sources. To the extent that a film can tell a controversial story objectively, that’s what they accomplish here. In fact, this film accomplishes something that Ted Kennedy was never able to do in relation to Chappaquiddick. It conducts itself with integrity. I cannot adequately express my respect to these filmmakers and their approach.

The conscience of the film, its moral center, is Kennedy’s cousin, Joseph Gargan (Ed Helms), known to the family as Joey. He was Kennedy’s logistics guy, as well as his attorney. He was there with his close friend, Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan), a former US Attorney for Massachusetts. After the accident, we see Kennedy stumble back to the cabin where the party was taking place. He says to Gargan, “I’m not going to be President.” Not: ‘there’s been a terrible accident, and I’m worried about Mary Jo.’ Not: ‘call the police.’ That line is one of many that indicts Ted Kennedy. It’s kinda horrifying. But it’s based on the sworn testimony of two members of the bar, two officers of the court. That’s the approach of the entire movie; if it happened, it’s onscreen. No embellishing, no sugarcoating. (Also, by the way, these two leading roles in a serious movie are played by comedians–Ed Helms and Jim Gaffigan–and they’re both terrific).

So we see them drive back to the bridge, we see Gargan and Markham dive down to the car, we see their inability to open a door. We see the three men, exhausted, sit on the bridge. We see them borrow a rowboat and row it back to Martha’s Vineyard (it being too late for the ferry to run), and we see these two respected attorneys tell Kennedy that he absolutely needed to report the accident immediately. We see him step into a phone booth, and place a call. But not to the police. He calls his father. Joe Kennedy (Bruce Dern), had had a stroke, and speaking was exceptionally difficult for him. But he has one word of advice for his son. “Alibi,” he says. And so Kennedy goes back to his hotel, has a bath, falls asleep on the bed, wakes up the next morning, dresses carefully, get himself some breakfast. And then, and only then, does he report the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.

From that point on, the movie is about the spinmeisters, the political operatives, the Kennedy team of seasoned image managers with which the Senator surrounded himself. Seeing as how it was 1969, they’re all older, white and male. Leading the charge is someone listed in the credits as ‘McNamara’, played by Clancy Brown. Robert McNamara? He was no longer Secretary of Defense in ’69–I think he was running the World Bank. Would he have been in those meetings? No idea, but as with most Clancy Brown characters, he’s a forceful and powerful presence in the movie, his character openly contemptuous of the 37 year-old Senator. Those scenes, with everyone trying to control the narrative and minimize the political damage are frankly kind of disgusting. It would only taken the slightest tweaking of tone for them to have been comedic–an interesting aesthetic choice, if Curran had chosen to go that way. Really, though, they’re about Kennedy’s continuing cowardice and ambition. And Gargan, meanwhile, is disgusted by it, and disillusioned.

So, no, it’s not a movie in which Kennedy looks even remotely decent. It’s a movie about cowardice. He was drinking before the accident, and lied about it. He initially wanted to lie about who was even driving the car. He showed up at Kopechne’s funeral wearing a neck brace he didn’t need, in a plea for sympathy. The idea of him giving a nationally televised address to set Chappaquiddick rumors to rest was his idea, as was the idea of invoking in that speech the memories of Jack and Bobby, the martyred brothers, making himself the victim in an event in which a young woman died. As his advisors hash out the wording of that speech, Kennedy says (in a stunning line), “We’re going to tell the truth! Or at least, our version of it.” One thought I had after watching it was gratitude that this weakling never became President.

But there’s another scene as well, with him and his father, in which old Joe, wizened and crippled and damaged, hands him a letter, in which he says (I’m paraphrasing), ‘you can become anything you want to. You can become a man of consequence, or you can choose not to. But if you choose nothing, I’ll have nothing to do with you.’ It’s a painful reminder of what must have been an excruciating childhood.

I think that larger perspective is part of what the filmmakers were aiming for. Kennedy looks like the worst kind of opportunist in this film, but it is, after all, about a terrible week in the man’s life. And the film acknowledges, and I think foreshadows, what would become of him. He would become the lion of the Senate, one of the most respected Senators in history, and an unflagging champion for progressive values. He became a man of consequence. Just not the one his father envisioned.

I respect and admire this film immensely. I especially like its portrayal of Mary Jo Kopechne. For most people, then and since, she wasn’t a woman worth paying a lot of attention to. What was she doing alone in a car with a married man (whose wife was also pregnant)? She had to have been his latest girl-on-the-side, a floozy, a tramp. As the film goes to some pains to point out, she was nothing of the kind. As Mara plays her, she was a canny, accomplished woman, a political operative–at the time of her death, she was managing a mayoral campaign in New Jersey. She was certainly not having an affair with Kennedy or with anyone else–indeed, she was engaged to be married. She was there, at Martha’s Vineyard, because Kennedy was trying to hire her, a job she hadn’t decided to accept, but was leaning towards turning down, there to see her old boiler room pals. She and Kennedy spend some time talking in the car, and those conversations are interesting. Kopechne was a listener. She’s quiet, reserved. She was valued as a counselor and a sounding board, someone whose opinion Kennedy valued, surrounded as he was by sycophants. And as he talks to her, he wants to know if he should run for President or not. The subject clearly consumed him, and he was never entirely sure if he even wanted it. More than that, though, he’s wondering who he is. As he puts it (again, I’m paraphrasing), ‘Joe was the hero, Jack was the leader, Bobby was the brilliant one. Who am I? The screw-up.’ In short, Mary Jo Kopechne was his friend. And yes, even in 1969, it was possible for a man and a woman to just be friends.

Kennedy of course has consistently denied that he had had an affair with her, which no one believes because why would we? Certainly Joan Kennedy (Andria Blackman), though we don’t see much of her, is royally honked off at him. But I like this movie’s portrayal of her. Mary Jo’s been labeled and forgotten and shoved aside by history, beginning with the Kennedy people. But she was worth remembering.

Ted Kennedy did eventually run for President, disastrously, in 1980, taking on a Democratic incumbent in the primaries, and losing in an ugly convention. Him running that year seems seems inexplicable to me. Did he feel so much pressure to run that he finally just decided to go for it, in an inauspicious year, to get it over with? I suspect so. But he was never able to shake Chappaquiddick. Nor, frankly, should he have. It was a terrible event, and a tragic one. And this film captures it, the tragedy of a good person’s unnecessary death, and the fall of a much lesser one. Pity and fear, man.