Over on JPGB I contemplate Chappaquiddick:

Chappaquiddick accomplishes something very few movies do: it explores why a man made an evil choice. That is very hard to do because (as James Q. Wilson put it in his brilliant little book Moral Judgement) any explaination for why someone made a decision naturally becomes an excuse for that decision. A man beats his children now because his father beat him twenty years ago; to the extent that the beatings twenty years ago really do explain the beatings now, the man’s choices seem less culpable, and to the extent that they don’t, the man’s choices are less comprehensible. Either the explanation of the evil act is not satisfactory as an explanation, in which case we are left unsatisfied, or the explanation of the evil act does satisfy as an explanation, in which case the act seems less evil.

Chappaquiddick does not compromise on the fact that Teddy Kennedy’s choices were evil. For that reason, it is getting a lot of attention from right-wingers who have long waited for some sort of justice to be done upon the Kennedy family’s crimes. Chappaquiddick shows, in ways that would be impossible for any fair-minded observer to deny, that Teddy Kennedy did evil things, and that is a sort of justice for which we have indeed waited long.

But if you walked out of this movie saying to yourself, “boy, Teddy Kennedy really did evil things in Chappaquiddick, didn’t he?” you missed the point of the movie.

Go see this outstanding film.