Wonderful Movie

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

First, there are facts, and there is reality. The facts give a broad bound on what occurred in a given situation, but anyone who has ever watched a trial knows that the facts can be spun in very different ways to further someone's intent.You can tell by briefly scanning through the reviews here that there are many reviews by the same person, saying the same things, often in the same words, the exact copy ... and all of those kind of reviews I found we all 9 or 10 out of 10 reviews. That says, those reviews are fake, but it also says that IMDB has a terrible problem with trolls and sock puppets here to promote their political purposes. Whether these people are Alt-Right America haters, or Russian American haters, the one thing they certainly are is fairness and justice and truth haters.The intent here is to smear and character assassinate a man who is dead and gone and cannot defend himself ... and should not have to. In a way this reminds me of the Woody Allen scandal where if someone were to make a movie of it, they would make it to appeal to one side or the other of the controversy, and then cherry pick the facts used to spin it to their purpose, and leave out of distort other facts.No one knows for sure what happened, but a lot of people view this in light of the world today ... that is, where Emergency Services are dependable and just a cell phone dial away. Maybe you have to be old enough to remember walking a mile in an emergency to get to a pay phone. Another thing is the ubiquity of highway lighting we have today in almost all but the most remote areas, or the standardization of reflective warning signage. Driving out over black water in the middle of the night was a different experience in the 60's.And accident in a car was also different. Most cars had just gotten seat belts and there were no seat belt laws and most people did not bother to use their seat-belts. Safety class was also not so technologically developed. Imagine being in an accident and how having all your wits about your either because you were tired or tipsy or both, had hard it would be to save yourself, let along look back in the dark and the water and try to see without a face mask and try to save someone in a heightened state of fear and exhaustian. Add to that the thought that your whole life might be ruined, and trying to guess what is the right to thing to do.In the Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about how when your adrenalin is pumping you go mind blind, he called it, and you cannot think straight.What Kennedy was guilty of is bad judgement of driving while drinking, and that was completely a different world back in those days. I don't even think it was illegal in my state of Texas, or it had just recently been outlawed that is what a different world 1969 was. The rest of what happenedThere were 55,000 traffic deaths in 1969, in 2007 there were 41,000. It was a different world, and whatever world this movie was in it was politically biased and ugly one where the right-wing is so rich they can make hack movies like this one and attack a man's whole life because of one mistake, distorted by lies and judged by a situation that people born today cannot really put in valid perspective when faced with the immediacy of a movie.Don't watch this movie, don't contribute money to the cause that made this movie, and do not watch movies that the actors who participated in this movie star in in the future. Stand against this kind of disgusting political manipulation, and fake news.

If you read Senatorial Privilege you'll get a much fuller and damning indictment of how this story unfolded. This film pays passing interest in to how the autopsy, driving license and grand jury indictment were scuppered or covered up. It's a good film, but seems more interested in personalities than covering the real events afterwards. Just before this I'd watched a docu / film about Pattie Hearst, lets be honest there really is one law for some and another for the rest.

While I am old enough to remember the event, it was certainly overshadowed by the moon landing which occurred at the same time and it was only as I got older did I read and understand more about the events which occurred.I read a review by a person who stated they read over 20 books on the incident and they gave it a very good rating. I enjoyed it for the acting and writing and, of course, the early depiction of what we now know as the political elite. Bruce Dern was great as Joe Kennedy even though he only spoke 6 words, "alibi" being one of them.NOW, if they would only do a movie about true Russian collusion that Ted Kennedy was involved in to stop Reagan, that may actually be more interesting and informative to Americans.

The story of the movie is speculative and does not hold water. When Ted Kennedy drove Kopechne away from the party, the story becomes questionable. Even though Chappaquiddick uses Kennedy's testimonies from the time, it also proves an impossible story to tell 100 percent accurately as certain parts don't quite add up.The strangest aspect of Kopechne's death is the fact that it took Kennedy 10 hours to call the police after driving the car off the bridge. As both the movie and the historical record divulge, a passerby found the car in the morning and called the police. The diver who extracted Kopechne's body said in his testimony that he could have gotten the woman out of the car in 25 minutes following the crash had he been notified, which the movie also shows.Instead of calling the authorities, Ted Kennedy testified that he tried to get Kopechne out of the car himself until he determined that he couldn't and returned to the cottage where the party had been held. There, he got his cousin Joe Gargan (Ed Helms) and Gargan's friend, U.S. Attorney Paul Markham (Jim Gaffigan), who joined the senator in forming a plan. In Kennedy's testimony, he said that he swam back to his hotel - he originally testified that he had been driving himself and Kopechne to the ferry dock to return to their respective hotels in Edgartown on Martha's Vineyard. In the movie, however, Joe and Paul bring Kennedy back to Edgartown on a row boat, where he then changes his suit and calls his father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. This is all speculative. The Kennedy team fixing the story is also speculative.Even though Chappaquiddick fills audiences in on the 10 hours between the accident and the next day when Kennedy finally called the police, it still largely remains mysterious why the senator chose not to call first responders immediately. "Gargan and Markham not only failed to get immediate help, but also let the senator swim back alone to report the accident from Edgartown," The movie also speculates that Kopechne could have been alive in the submerged car for a few hours following the crash. But nobody knows the truth of what happened to her. She could have been dead shortly after the accident. Many questions remain with no answers, many speculations with no evidence, and even though Chappaquiddick mostly accurately recounts the events of July 18, 1969 in Massachusetts, the only thing that audiences will walk out of the theater knowing for sure is that the exact events following the car crash will likely never be revealed.