“Chappaquiddick,” a new film starring Jason Clarke and Kate Mara, recreates an infamous event to unveil the inner workings of one of America’s most powerful families.
Clarke, an Australian actor best known for his work in “Zero Dark Thirty,” plays Senator Ted Kennedy, the youngest son of a political dynasty. As the movie begins brothers John and Bobby have both been assassinated, gunned down while in office. It’s 1969 and Ted is eyeing a White House run in 1972.
The incident that gives the film its name took place on Friday, July 18, 1969. Kennedy threw a party on Chappaquiddick Island, a ferry ride away from Edgartown on the nearby larger island of Martha’s Vineyard, as a reunion of the “boiler-room girls,” six women who were the engine of Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. Also in attendance is Kennedy’s cousin (and fixer) Joseph Gargan (Ed Helms), former U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Paul F. Markham (Jim Gaffigan) and political campaign specialist Mary Jo Kopechne (Mara).
While the others drank, danced and dined Kennedy and Kopechne took a fateful drive that would end when Kennedy veered off a bridge and into a tidal channel. Kennedy escaped, leaving Kopechne to drown.
What follows is the battle between Ted’s conscience and his political well-being, a mish-mash of power, influence and morality. Kennedy ultimately fessed up, pleading guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident causing bodily injury, but not before crafting a carefully worded statement and faking a concussion.
“Chappaquiddick’s” story of a weak man who panicked is a compelling one, especially when embellished with layers of political and personal intrigue. Clarke is physically imposing, a bear of a man, but plays Kennedy as a little boy. Blustery on the outside but always looking to his wheelchair-bound father (Bruce Dern) for approval. Kennedy Sr., a power broker who valued his son’s success more than the boys themselves, is only onscreen for a few minutes but his presence and influence looms large in the story.
The wheeling and dealing that surrounds the partial cover-up of Ted’s involvement in Kopechne’s passing are in part to try and protect Kennedy’s upcoming run for the White House and in part to the father of all Kennedys happy. It’s a fascinating dynamic and director John Curran finds a balance between the two high-stakes situations.
A strong supporting cast, including Ed Helms in a rare dramatic role, help pull back the curtain on the latter day Camelot, revealing the behind-the-scenes machinations that kept Ted Kennedy in the Senate and out of jail. “Chappaquiddick” is step-by-step, methodical, but the crime procedural elements of the story are second to the examination of the Kennedy power structure.
The house is one of the strangest buildings ever erected. A massive 24,000 square feet, the rambling Queen Anne-style Victorian mansion has zigzagging staircases, 2,000 doors, rooms-within-rooms and over 10,000 windows. Some will even tell you the old place is haunted. Located on nine acres in Silicon Valley it is known as the Winchester Mystery House.
These days the house is open to the public but for many years it was the obsession of Sarah Winchester, the eccentric heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company fortune, who envisioned the place as home to an “army of ghosts.”
This weekend, in the mystery thriller Winchester, Helen Mirren plays her. The backstory sees the widowed Winchester, reeling from the loss of her husband William in 1881, visit a psychic in hopes of finding solace. He says her recent tragedies — the loss of a daughter, father-in-law and husband — were the work of the spirits of people killed by the Winchester repeating rifle, a.k.a. The Gun That Won The West. To save herself from the restless spectres, he told her to move west and build a home big enough to accommodate all the phantoms that bedevilled her family.
She took the advice to heart, buying a large 161-acre plot of land in San Jose, Calif., and began building. And building. Legend has it that with no blueprints, Winchester, one of the richest women of the 1880s, spent the next 38 years — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year — working on the strange dwelling.
Winchester lived in the house during construction and, to confuse curious spirits, never slept more than one night consecutively in any of the bedrooms. At night she held séances to confer with the ghosts who shared her living space, hence the nickname The Mansion Designed By Spirits. Guided by those apparitions she ordered never-ending alterations that required the use of maps to navigate. The place grew to such a size that after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake damaged the home, it took the staff hours to find her in the labyrinth of rooms.
Just as eccentric as the ever-evolving layout were Winchester’s home decor choices. She engraved the numbers 7 and 11 throughout the house for good luck and the number 13 to ward off evil spirits. A chandelier was redesigned to hold 13 candles instead of the usual 12 and drain covers on sinks were punched with 13 holes. Today, in tribute, a large 13-shaped topiary tree sits on the property and every Friday the 13th a bell is rung 13 times at 1300 hours.
Winchester lived in the home until her death in 1922. Work on the home ceased instantly and there are several half-driven nails in the walls where carpenters stopped hammering when they heard the news.
Winchester has the underpinnings of a good psychological drama but a biography dampens the mythology with a dose of reality. In the book Captive of the Labyrinth: Sarah L. Winchester, Heiress to the Rifle Fortune, author Mary Jo Ignoffo says Winchester “routinely dismissed workers for months at a time ‘to take such rest as I might.’”
Whatever the truth, Mirren sums it up best: “There’s nothing like it anywhere that I’ve ever seen. It grew out of such very specific circumstances that are sort of unrepeatable.”
Here are Richard’s “Canada AM” reviews for “Black Mass” and “Everest,” plus a look back at the highlights from the Toronto International Film Festival!
If you’re an armchair adventurer like me the hardships the characters in the new snowsuit drama “Everest” put themselves through—and pay handsomely for—seem extreme. Paying $65,000 to climb to the summit of Earth’s highest mountain seems a high price to risk life and limb and when I say life and limb, I mean it. If the altitude and avalanches don’t get you, frostbite may well take an arm or a leg.
Based on the real events of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, Jason Clark plays Rob Hall, experienced climber and leader of commercial expeditions up the mountain. His group, Adventure Consultants, is one of several making the trip. Another, led by party boy Scott Fischer (Jake Gyllenhaal) leaves at the same time, and agrees to share resources on the trek. Climbers include Beck Weathers (Josh Brolin), Doug Hansen (John Hawkes), Yasuko Namba (Naoko Mori) and journalist Jon Krakauer (Michael Kelly). Some reach the summit, others do not, but the trick isn’t getting to the top, it’s getting back down again, and that’s where the drama really begins.
Director Baltasar Kormákur delivers a screen full of beautiful—and occasionally vertigo inducing–“You are there 3-D shots” to give the viewer a sense of the dangers Hall and Company are up against and you will want to take a hot bath after the frostbite scenes, but the human element is lacking.
Kormákur tries to set the stakes before much actual climbing happens. Back home marriages are crumbling and wives are expecting babies but that’s about as far as we get with any real character work. Sure, Hall is a principled and skilled climber, heroic even, but the movie gets beyond the broad strokes with the cast. When they start falling and freezing to death it’s hard to muster much emotion, given that we never really get to know the characters. The fact they’re all bundled up in snow gear and mostly unrecognizable most of the time doesn’t help. Remind me again, was Doug wearing the blue or the yellow suit?
(SPOILER ALERT) There are some unexpected turns. Suffice to say that marquee value does not guarantee survival.
We never get a palpable, passionate answer as to why the climbers are so driven to hike up the side of a mountain to the approximate cruising altitude of a Boeing 747. It’s not enough to say, “It’s not altitude, it’s the attitude.” A little more depth would have helped the movie scale new heights and given us a reason to embrace the characters.
If George Mallory, the English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s, was a film critic he might suggest you go see “Everest” “Because it’s there,” but his famous line doesn’t apply here. Instead, go for the scenery, but don’t expect great drama.
Where would Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career be without these three simple words: “I’ll be back”? Taken from The Terminator it’s as simple a phrase as was ever uttered in the movies, but became a pop culture catchphrase, and came to define Arnold’s career on screen and off.
He’s used the line—or a slight variation on it—in three other Terminator movies and eight other films. In 1993’s Last Action Hero he says it three times! He utters it one more time as he jumps from one helicopter to another in this weekend’s Terminator Genisys.
Few actors have done so much with so little. But the perfectly crafted saying almost didn’t happen.
“In the treatment it was ‘I’ll come back,’” The Terminator director and co-writer James Cameron told me. “In the script it was ‘I’ll be back.’ I don’t remember why I changed it. It just sounded better.”
The line certainly played no small part in establishing Schwarzenegger larger-than-life action hero image even though Arnold had problems with it when they were shooting the film.
In his autobiography, Total Recall, Schwarzenegger recalls, “Our biggest disagreement was about ‘I’ll be back’. I was arguing for ‘I will be back’. I felt that the line would sound more machine-like and menacing without the contraction.
“[But] we shot it as written in the script. The truth was that, even after all these years of speaking English, I still didn’t understand contractions.”
“There is something about the way the line plays,” says Cameron, “not just Arnold’s delivery, but the fact that you’ve seen enough of him in action up to that point to know that when he says ‘I’ll be back’ something really bad is going to happen. There is a counterpoint between the innocence of the words and the threat that is a wink to the audience. And the audience likes to be in the position of knowing what is going to happen next. They may not know the details but they know something bad is going to happen and then it pays off. He just comes flying through the window in a car and takes out the whole place. So there is something kind of delicious about the anticipation that it produces.”
The line’s popularity wasn’t planned. Cameron, who has three quips on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Movie Quotes list—“I’ll be back,” “Hasta la vista, baby” from T2 and Titanic’s “I’m king of the world!—says it is a bad idea to try and write catchphrases.
“I think it is a very hard thing to try and do that,” he says. “I think I was somewhat self conscious about it when I did Terminator 2 and he says ‘Hasta le vista baby.’ That I knew I was doing a line, an Arnold line. I think it is a very dangerous area because it can so easily blow up on you and I tend not to do that.”
Schwarzenegger has been associated with dozens of one-liners. So many, in fact that a youtube video titled 160 Greatest Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes has over twenty million hits, but as widely imitated as “Hasta la vista, baby” was—even Chilean president Michelle Bachelet aped Arnold’s famous delivery of the line—“I’ll be back” remains his most iconic line.
After 31 years, four movies, two classics, one almost ran and one Rotten Tomatoes reject, it was only a matter of time until Hollywood had pushed the “Terminator” franchise too far and had to cannibalize itself and reinvent the story.
In “Terminator: Genisys” after time travel has landed Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke) and Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) to her future but his past (Huh?) Detective O’Brien (J.K. Simmons) tries to wrap his head around the situation.
“I know whatever’s going on here must be really, really complicated,” he says.
“We’re here to stop the end of the world,” says Sarah.
“I can work with that.”
Hopefully so can the audience. The fourth “Terminator” movie warns us time and time again not to pay too much attention to the plot, which is a confounding mess of time travel that completely rewrites the Connor mythology.
“Everything has changed,” says Sarah, “the 1984 John sent you to no longer exists,” which is essentially sci fi screenwriter lingo for, We’ve changed most everything you thought you knew about the “Terminator” folklore. Reese put it in simpler terms, “Time travel makes my head hurt.”
The action begins in 2029, years after Judgement Day when artificial intelligence system Skynet became sentient and tried to destroy humanity. Resistance hero John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends his right hand man (and son) Reese back in time to protect Sarah Connor, make sure she survives and in turn will live to give birth to John who will save humanity. It’s a bit of a Möbius strip, but at least it is a familiar one.
Once Reese transports back in time there’s a glitch and the past has changed. Lethal T-1000 Terminators are waiting for him and Sarah is already a warrior aided by her man-machine companion, the T-800 model Terminator (Arnold “I’m old but not obsolete” Schwarzenegger). “There’s a new mission,” says Sarah, “if the past can change so can the future.” The plan is to destroy Genisys, a computer operating system that will link everything—phones to tablets, tablets to cars… it will run the whole shebang—and will enable Skynet. And you thought having to change your Apple passwords all the time was a pain. Throwing a wrench into the job is (ALMOST A SPOILER BUT NOT REALLY) an unwelcome and unexpected family reunion.
There’s enough time travel here for three regular movies, but “Terminator: Genisys” is no regular movie. It’s a summer blockbuster meant to breathe life back into the silvery skeletoned franchise. It bigger, louder and dumber than ever before with a big action sequence every ten minutes and an ending that guarantees a sequel. The heretical meddling with the story aside, “Terminator” fans will likely enjoy watching the relentless T-1000 (Byung-hun Lee) scenes, old Arnold going mano a mano with a younger version of himself or the relationship between Sarah and the T-800 (although she calls him “Pops” too many times for my taste) but endless exposition—this is a story that needs some explaining—drags the middle part of the movie down.
“Terminator Genisys” is robotic in its presentation of the story. In an effort to make something new out of the pieces of the past, the movie relies on twists and time travel theatrics to push the plot instead of an actual coherent story. Reese’s past may be O’Brien’s present and Connor’s future, but the time spent watching this movie is two hours of our time spent in almost total confusion.
“Chappaquiddick,” a new film starring Jason Clarke and Kate Mara, recreates an infamous event to unveil the inner workings of one of America’s most powerful families.
