Chappaquiddick

As Ted Kennedy (Jason Clarke) prepares to do his career-saving TV address, the slightly upward shot of his shadowed jowels and flattened hair make him look like Donald Trump. That clear echo provides this film’s main thrust. 

  Like any responsible history film, it’s about Now as much as about Then. The subject is the essential corruption of American federal politics on both sides of the house, then as now, Democrats as well as Republicans.

In anatomizing the end of the Kennedy glory years, director John Curran suggests the depressing spiral from the end of Kennedy idealism to the present corruption. We’re used to thinking of those Dems and our GOP as antithetical. This film equates them.

The TV shots of John Kennedy and the moon landing remind us of when America was truly great — hopeful, ambitious, a global leader and a beacon of democracy. But the film’s main thrust exposes that myth. 

The Kennedy machine that marshals around Ted here is as unscrupulous, lying and destructive as what depresses us in today’s news. We watch the disintegration of the Kennedy myth and character. 

Hence Teddy’s lack of any genuine moral compass — especially when he professes to have one. When he abandons his responsible plan to resign he confirms our sense of American politics as power-hungry, self-serving and fraudulent. 

This Kennedy and Trump have something else in common — their insatiable need to impress  an intractable father. Both weakling sons project a fake swagger. 

Womanizing is but one aspect of their ersatz manliness. Mainly they need to convince everyone — especially their fathers — that they are “great.”  This is how the Kennedy years and the Trump year form a continuum here not a contrast. Joe Kennedy’s failure of a son seems to lead directly down the rabbit hole to Trump. Ted’s dead-eyed Joan is an echo of Melania. 

  Both showmen also pretend to the common touch, highjacking the spirit of populism to grab power for their own use. Hence the team's manipulation of Mary Jo Kopechne's grieving parents. Ted’s “family” speech to his Boiler Room girls leads to the TV interviews in which his Massachusetts voters buy his TV “Act” and resolve to re-elect him.

        So too the power of celebrity for which sheriffs, judges, doctors, journalists, roll over to oblige. 

The film reminds us that Ted failed to win the presidential nomination but became the fourth longest-serving American senator. 

      What I missed was a closing statement summarizing the remarkable career and achievements The Lion of Congress  went on to make. But that would have been my movie not Curran’s. His present enterprise is not as optimistic as my conclusion would have been. Rather than rationalize Ted’s amorality he prefers to leave the film as an exposure of systemic fraudulence and corruption in federal politics. Trump is not the casue of the current abandonment of democracy in America but it's symptom. Sad.

         If The Post recalled a hopeful model of how to protect a democracy against a corrupt presidency, this rather ends on a resigned Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. Both parties need to take this message to heart -- and voters might learn not to be so eagerly gulled.