FILM REVIEW: ‘Chappaquiddick’ Is A Dive Into The Sickness Of Entitlement

[EasyAce]

By Sarah Lee
https://www.redstate.com/slee/2018/03/23/film-review-chappaquiddick-dive-sickness-entitlement/

For anyone worried about the future under the leadership of the millennial generation, take heart: there is hope.

The new film Chappaquiddick, detailing Sen. Ted Kennedy’s 1969 Martha’s Vineyard car accident that led to the death of a young woman he left at the scene to drown, proves it . . .

. . . At a Thursday night screening of the film (organized by The Federalist) in Washington, D.C., Executive Producer Mark Ciardi was on hand and took questions following the viewing from a room full of writers and journalists — and very probably a room full of people not forgiving of the events of that fateful weekend just before Kennedy’s brother, JFK, landed men on the moon (which is a key plot element in the film).

Ciardi said the screenwriters were two young men in their late 20s, early 30s who had never heard the Chappaquiddick story but were intrigued when Bill Maher mentioned it as a defining moment in American politics.

The production notes go further:

. . . Screenwriters Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan, who both grew up in Dallas where John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, had a strong emotional connection to the Kennedy family, long before their 2015 screenplay landed on the Blacklist. Living there, the tragedy in Dealey Plaza was impossible to ignore and it sowed a lifelong curiosity about the Kennedys’ Camelot.  However, neither had ever heard about CHAPPAQUIDDICK.

While watching Real Time with Bill Maher in 2008 Hillary Clinton had just lost to Barack Obama and Bill commented that it was because of Ted Kennedy’s endorsements of Barack Obama that he unexpectedly beat Hillary for the nomination and then what he said next, instinctually just grabbed us: Ted Kennedy has changed presidential history because, if hadn’t been for Chappaquiddick, he would have been president in 1972 and it changed the course of presidential history.

Taylor was 28 and knew he was a pretty smart guy and well educated. How could something seemingly so important, been absent from the conversations about the Kennedys.

The more we learned, the more this story unfolded with layers of intrigue, and the implications were wide ranging . . .