The Senator (2017)

Jason Clarke is a very fine actor (he's still on our big screens at the moment in Oppenheimer) and he does his best to capture the awkwardness of Ted Kennedy, the youngest of the Kennedy brothers who always lived in the shadow of his brothers Jack and Bobby. The Senator focuses on the key moment of Ted's life; whilst driving from a party on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969 his car spirals off a bridge into the water, resulting in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young lady who had worked as a researcher for Bobby Kennedy.

The film then focuses on the next few days following the tragedy and with Ted not immediately reporting the incident it leads to a mountain of trouble for the senator, one that had ambitions of emulating Jack in reaching the White House.

Although only Ted Kennedy will ever know what really happened that night, The Senator doesn't do a particularly good job of offering us the suffering from Kopechne's family, focusing its bulk on Kennedy. Which would be fine if it didn't attempt to provide plenty of sympathy to Kennedy, the tone seems odd when whichever way you look at it, Ted Kennedy was very much the reason behind a young girls' death.

It's easier to believe how difficult it was for Ted in his political career; with an overbearing and madly driven Father (played here by Bruce Dern) who'd already lost two sons to assassinations and one to the war, and certainly, one believes that Ted was never a true believer in his own ambitions with regards to reaching the White House, but the fact that he still made a run for the Democratic Presidential Nomination in 1980 tells you exactly what you need to know about the murkiness of the politics on display here.

It's far from terrible, but when you consider the looming behemoth that is Oliver Stone's JFK (1991) in terms of films about tragedies in the Kennedy family it's left severely lacking. That's perhaps much too harsh a comparison, but The Senator is very much a footnote when the story it's depicting had the potential for so much more. 5.4/10