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#116. The Substandard on Chappaquiddick
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(JVL is out this week.) Vic and Sonny only, following a Washington Free Beacon field trip to see Chappaquiddick.
Dudes Chatting — Chappaquiddick: Vic and Sonny break down the film as two movies in one: a tragedy about a son who can never earn his father's love, and a dark comedy of elite damage control. They praise Jason Clarke's Ted Kennedy (accent inconsistent but the performance works), Bruce Dern's terrifying Joe Kennedy Sr. (his "alibi" line got a huge reaction from the Free Beacon audience), Clancy Brown as Bob McNamara, and Taylor Nichols as Ted Sorensen. Vic recounts meeting Ted Kennedy in person in 1989. The episode closes with a brief note on the asymmetry of political criticism — "only the dead Democrat can be criticized."
Full transcript
Guest00:00:00Hello and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard, brought to you by Wink Wine Club.
Vic00:00:22I'm Victor Matus, along with Sonny Bunch and Jonathan V. Last. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of The Substandard are available every Thursday at 11 a.m. Sonny, how are you?
Sonny00:00:33I'm great. JBL, how are you?
Vic00:00:36Oh, good. Nothing?
Sonny00:00:38No. Oh. Well, once again. We appear to be typing at the Free Beacon office. Studio 2A. Studio 2A.
Vic00:00:46And, yes, we were not told, even in studio we were not told last week. No. He did not tell us that he was out.
Sonny00:00:53Late notice. That's okay. Sadly. Sadly no JBL today.
Vic00:00:56But you know what? We're going to do this micro anyway because we've got to keep this thing going. We do it.
Sonny00:01:01We do it for the people.
Vic00:01:02We do it for people. And you know what else? The dream shall never die. The dream.
Sonny00:01:05What is that? The dream shall never die.
Vic00:01:07I was going to say, the dream shall never die, which is a famous line, as you know, Sonny, by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
Sonny00:01:15Oh, hey now.
Vic00:01:15From his speech in 1980. So, speaking of which. Speaking of Ted Kennedy. So, you weren't there.
Sonny00:01:21Speaking of dying.
Vic00:01:22Yes. Last Friday, the Washington Free Beacon had a little movie day. So, we had a half day. A field trip. You missed it. I did. But we all went to see the movie Chappaquiddick. Yeah. And it was great. We had the whole movie theater to ourselves. I believe Harrison, Aaron Harrison, was sitting in a back row all alone with a giant tub of popcorn and making all sorts of noises throughout the, a lot of scoffing. And ridiculing and scorn. He's not a quiet movie goer. No. And especially when the theater is all ours. And there was about 18 of us there. It was, you know, laughing at appropriate moments, you know, of incredulity, shall we say. But I would say overall, I think everyone liked it. I don't know if that's the right word to use. What surprised me, Sonny, was the number of people, obviously some of our younger colleagues who are born in the mid-90s, shall we say, who are only vaguely familiar with Chappaquiddick. They didn't even know maybe what the name referred to. I mean, they knew what something happened to Ted Kennedy and this thing, but not all these gory details. And they were quite stunned by it. And especially, I'd say, the female colleagues were rather disgusted by sort of the loyalty, the undying loyalty to Senator Ted Kennedy in all this.
Sonny00:02:44You reviewed it. You liked it. Well, we should fill people in who maybe do not know what Chappaquiddick is. So Chappaquiddick, of course, is a movie about the... The incident in 1969 in which Ted Kennedy, drunk, drove off a bridge just off Martha's Vineyard and into a kind of a shallow channel pond, whatever. And he escaped from the car, which flipped over, and the woman who was with him, Mary Jo Kopechny, died. She died. Now, there's some question as to how she died. If she drowned or if she suffocated. There's a reasonable theory that there was a pocket of air in the car. I mean, there was literally a pocket of air in the car. The question is, did she keep her head above water and suffocate as opposed to drown? Now, the reason this matters is because Ted Kennedy did not report the crime until 10 hours later. He went back to his party, he got driven home to his hotel. Once he was there, he basically went to sleep. And, you know, there's some creative license here. In the movie, we don't know exactly what happened. But in the movie, Teddy calls up Joe, Joe Kennedy, the evil scion of the Kennedy clan. Played by the great. Bootlegger and played by the great Bruce Dern. And the one thing that Joe says on the phone to him is, alibi. I mean, it's literally something out of a horror movie.
Vic00:04:25The whole theater, by the way, they laughed and scorned at that moment.
Sonny00:04:31So, anyway, the movie itself. So, the movie follows the events of this basically three or four day period where they're trying, where the Kennedys are trying to figure out how to handle this situation. And I quite like the movie. It's a very interesting film insofar as it's kind of two different films put together. The first is almost a tragic story. It's a tragedy about a son who can't earn the love of his father, who feels immense pressure to, you know, live up to various ideals and is a weak and callow individual and can't do it. And the second part of the film is almost a comedy of errors. I mean, it's surprisingly funny. I don't know how the theater reacted to it.
Vic00:05:15Again, there are a lot of, you know, sort of gasps and groans and laughs in a dark comedy. Since you talk about it in your review. Yeah, yeah. And you're right. It is this dark comedy of errors where you have this coterie of advisors from sort of the highest echelons of power, like Ted Sorensen and Bob McNamara et al. And they're all trying to do damage control over a DUI, possibly vehicular manslaughter incident. And they're, you know, it's like this combined brain power. And yet still they can't get it straight.
Sonny00:05:48And I mean, the problem is that they're dealing here with the Fredo of the Kennedy. Klan, which is like, this is this is this is how this is how he is portrayed in the film is I there's there's a line that's like, you know, Joe, Joe Jr. Was the was the charming or Joe Jr. Was the great one, the hero. And then Jack was the charming one. And Bobby was the brilliant one. And I'm just, you know, I'm the idiot. I'm like, I'm the one who nobody, you know, you never expected much from me. And it's it is actually it is again, it's like it's it's somewhat tragic, but also somewhat comic. I mean, it's like he's he's pathetic. He's a. Pathetic person.
Vic00:06:22Could the I found it rather I don't know if the word is courageous that this movie is coming out. I mean, there is a time where you wouldn't dare go against, you know, this this this great liberal political dynasty. The Kennedy family and Democrats would have, I think, you know, circled the wagons on on this cast. But I don't know. I mean, is it is it just like it could only happen now that you can only come out now?
Sonny00:06:45Well, you know, I I'm I'm thinking about writing a piece and maybe maybe I will. Maybe I won't about how the. You know, there's this old joke that the only good conservatives is a dead conservative, right? You know, like, you know, now Barry Goldwater is held up as a, you know, founding statesman, you know, and he was literally called crazy, too crazy to be president. And then Reagan, of course, but like the tear on the Time magazine cover and how Obama so like Reagan, he's very Reagan asking, you know, and everybody hated Reagan.
Vic00:07:15In fact, I just overheard earlier today MSNBC commercial when there's a they use a commercial. Quote from Reagan for the MSNBC commercial.
Sonny00:07:24Yeah. So so there's but the flip side of this is the only the only bad Democrat is a dead Democrat. The only Democrat you can actually criticize is someone who is dead. And you can and you and you very specifically, the media does this. They use the dead Democrat as a way to show how the Democratic Party has progressed beyond that. But the Republicans has been tweeted. The Republicans are still so, you know, where there was a Jill Filip Filipovich piece that she was like, you know, the the the Democrats have moved beyond this Kennedy mystique. But what this movie Republicans are still, you know, they basically would drown women if they could. And like I just like, are you kidding me with this? It's actually it's actually hilarious. It's crazy. It's I mean, it's funny. But but this is a but this is this is kind of beside the point. The movie itself, I really enjoyed. I thought it was great. I loved I loved all of the I love the cast. The cast is really well put together as a small project, right?
Guest00:08:18This is small. Yeah, smallish.
Sonny00:08:20I mean, you know, Jason Clarke isn't. Huge star, but he's the guy you recognize. He's in Zero Dark Thirty. He was great. Terminator Genesis. He's been in a in a bunch of movies and he he's an Australian, which I don't think most people, you know, I don't know. I don't know how you felt about his Ted Kennedy accent accent. It kind of came and went, I thought.
Vic00:08:38I think I only thought that because I read your review when you talk about so I noticed it more and more.
Sonny00:08:45But the but I really like the two my two favorite performances in this movie were. Or people I most enjoyed seeing were Clancy Brown as Bob McNamara.
Vic00:08:55Love Clancy Brown.
Sonny00:08:56And Taylor Nichols as as as Sorenson, Ted Sorenson. Whit Stillman. Who is a Whit Stillman regular. And and I and he and he he I mean, like he he's I wouldn't say he's like a great character actor, but he he has this kind of he has this kind of like joviality and like matter of factness and to the pointness about him that that really drives home kind of the I mean, really the grotesque way. The Kennedys handled this situation.
Vic00:09:24I love Clancy Brown, who many of us will remember from Shawshank Redemption. He was the head corrections officer. Terrible, terrible guy. And he's kind of a hulking figure still. I mean, he's huge. He's huge. He's an enormous man. I don't I don't think McNamara was that sort of in the Oliver Stone school of Paul Servino as Henry Kissinger, these giant hulking figures, but good performance.
Sonny00:09:49Great performance. And he's also the Kurgan in Highland. Ah, he was the he was the villain in Highlander. OK.
Vic00:09:55And the other thing I was going to say was the guy who plays the chief of police in the movie Chappaquiddick, John Fiore, who I said, why do I know that? He's like so familiar. And he many years ago, he was Gigi on The Sopranos. Yeah. Remember that?
Sonny00:10:09Remember how Gigi died? No. On the John. Oh, that's right. That's right.
Vic00:10:14And thereby allowing, you know, Joy Pants to become the next captain. I actually, you know, I did tell you this. I met Ted. Oh, really? Yes. I was in high school and I was so I did one of those stupid sort of nerd weeks in Washington. And you could tell your school would let you go out. So this is like spring or fall. It was like maybe fall of 89 or spring of 1990. I think it was fall of 89. And so I go to and I had not really been to Washington before. I was there when I was like in third grade. So I come over there and they, you know, at some point everyone gets to meet their member of Congress, whoever that is. So I was on my way. I was on my way to meet Frank Pallone, who I had no idea who he was at the time. I didn't know if he was a Democrat or Republican. I think I called him Senator. But, of course, he was a congressman. And he's been redistricted since then. That's how little I knew. And I remember because you'd go to the wherever, Cannon House Office Building, and I remember the rows and rows of dark wooden phone booths that they had for the reporters and people to use that, which I don't know if it's there anymore. But on my way there, I was alone. I had my suit and my name tag from National Young Leaders. Oh, yeah. NYLC. NYLC.
Guest00:11:24It was terrible.
Sonny00:11:25I definitely did not do that.
Vic00:11:26It was awful. And anyway, so I have my name tag, and I'm walking alone. And this is before, I mean, it was, you know, you could easily roam around the Capitol back then, back in 89. And I look up on the sidewalk, and coming right towards me is Ted Kennedy, alone, alone. He was without anybody. And I was without anybody. There was nobody around.
Sonny00:11:46Did you scream, murderer? I know.
Vic00:11:47It was very strange because I just looked at him. I said, oh, my gosh. He, I knew. I knew Ted Kennedy. Him, I knew. So it just happened, sort of like in Frost-Nixon with James Reston, where the hand just comes out. And I just said, hi, Senator, you know. And he shook my hand, and he obviously saw the name tag on my jacket. And he's like, ah, welcome to Washington. And then he was on his way. He was wearing a double-breasted suit because that's what he did, and he looked like a giant block.
Sonny00:12:13Yeah, well, he was a big man.
Vic00:12:14He was a big man. And I shook his hand, and I had no idea I was shaking hands with a murderer.
Sonny00:12:19Murderer. Killer. Yeah, well, I'm sure it was fine.
?00:12:22Thank you.
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