An excerpt from my script review for Chappaquiddick which will be available 05/14/18:
3.) Quality of Characters
Good old fashioned love triangle.
And I’m not talking romance, but bromance!
Joey Gargan loves Ted Kennedy who loves Joe Kennedy.
Ted bounces back and forth between the man he wants to be, who Gargan sides with, to the standard of Kennedy his father expects but Ted can never hope to meet.
And that’s tragic really, because as much as Joe Kennedy helps Ted in this story, he loathes his son, and only does so to preserve everything he’s sacrificed for the Kennedy name.
This may have worked if Ted weren’t such a fucking constant flip flop.
It becomes exhausting how many times he tells Joey Gargan that he is a Kennedy, only to get mad at him and later remark to quit pretending to be part of the name.
They’re a team, and then they’re enemies…over and over.
Back and forth a time or two is fine, but you’re not accomplishing anything with your character arc if it looks more closely resembles a radio wave transmission.
There should have been this monumental build up, of Ted coming to terms with what he did after admitting he was driving, some salvageable part of his soul Joey will want to fight for, and the “brain trust” be a minor hiccup, only to have the speech at the end where Joey’s forced to hold the cue cards…how insulting, especially if Ted tells Joe Kennedy he’s doing it his way as the final Kennedy son.
But we didn’t get that. We received multiple versions of the indicident, where Ted’s rather pathetic in all of them, and even when he’s trying to be redeemable, we don’t really care.
His crying on his father’s shoulder wasn’t relatable, it was a cringy kind of sad.
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