I thought, given the fact that many young people might not remember Senator Kennedy and have no idea about the facts around the Chappaquiddick incident, that this film would be an opportunity to expose political noobs to the time in America where a politician really could get away with murder (well, at least involuntary manslaughter through negligence)... Don't get me wrong, the movie does a great job showing us the facts and I did enjoy that part of it as a historic political junky (on a trip to DC, I took a picture of myself pretending to scale a fence around the Watergate complex). That said, this movie nearly put me to sleep... it was almost too clinical, stuck too much to the facts with very little speculation, like maybe it should have been done in a more documentary style but of course, this has already been done a million times over with Chappaquiddick.
The acting is good, Clarke is very believable as Kennedy and Clancy Brown's job as Robert McNamara really stands out. I felt a little wanting though for Mary Jo... She was portrayed well and I guess believably but I still feel like I didn't get to know her. That was supposedly the promise of this movie but Mary Jo (just as in real life) was gone all too quickly. Maybe this could have been told by a disembodied Mary Jo who has some flashbacks to her past and the other Kennedy campaigns with the boiler room girls.
The acting is good, Clarke is very believable as Kennedy and Clancy Brown's job as Robert McNamara really stands out. I felt a little wanting though for Mary Jo... She was portrayed well and I guess believably but I still feel like I didn't get to know her. That was supposedly the promise of this movie but Mary Jo (just as in real life) was gone all too quickly. Maybe this could have been told by a disembodied Mary Jo who has some flashbacks to her past and the other Kennedy campaigns with the boiler room girls.