Amazon.co.uk Reviews
In the final quarter or so of
Bobby, writer-director-actor Emilio Estevez finally starts tightening his grip on the viewer as we head inexorably toward the film's climax: the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. In the course of these scenes--among them Kennedy's acceptance speech after winning the California Democratic presidential primary (the senator is seen only in file footage), his death at the hands of gunman Sirhan Sirhan, and the chaos and despair that ensued--Estevez steadily ratchets up the sense of tension and dread. Knowing exactly what's coming, while the characters onscreen don't, is excruciating, as is our grief at hearing RFK's own words, so eloquent, so hopeful and inspiring, as we watch the horrible events unfold and wonder what might have been (sure it's manipulative--but it works). But the rest of
Bobby isn't nearly as compelling. Nor is it really about Kennedy, despite its obvious adulation of the man whom many thought would defeat Richard Nixon in the '68 general election. In the tradition of, say, an Irwin Allen disaster flick, we're invited into the lives of nearly two dozen folks, most of them at least partly fictional, who were at the Ambassador Hotel that June day, including guests, staff (kitchen workers, switchboard operators, management, etc.), campaign workers, reporters, and more.
There are lots of movie stars in the cast, and some of them (Sharon Stone, Helen Hunt, William H. Macy) are very good. But caring about the quotidian minutiae of these people's existences is a chore, and Estevez crams so many issues into his story (the Vietnam war, drugs, alcoholism, voting irregularities, adultery, racism, immigration, communism... even L.A. Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale's streak of consecutive shutouts) and tries so obviously to establish parallels between then and now that too much of the movie feels gratuitous and forced. A warts-and-all film about Robert Kennedy's extraordinary life and career would be welcome. Unfortunately Bobby isn't it. --Sam Graham
Synopsis
An ambitious labour of love from writer/director/actor Emilio Estevez, BOBBY depicts the hope, anger, and frustration that gripped the U.S. in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement still reeling from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the country stuck in a quagmire over Vietnam, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign preached a message of peace and tolerance. Ironically, that message would be his undoing, when on June 5th, 1969, a day after winning the California primaries, he was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist. The film’s Ambassador Hotel setting serves as a microcosm of class and race, with characters ricocheting off each other like charged particles, until the inevitably violent denouement. In the hotel’s kitchen, the mostly Mexican staff suffer abuse at the hands of their bigoted manager Timmons (Christian Slater). This doesn’t go unnoticed by hotelier Paul Ebbers (William H. Macy), who scolds Timmons for his racist behaviour. But Ebbers’ own conduct is not without reproach; he’s having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) behind the back of his beautician wife (Sharon Stone). Elsewhere, young Diane (Lindsay Lohan) prepares to marry her classmate, William (Elijah Wood), in order to save him from going to Vietnam, and two collegiate campaigners for Senator Kennedy remove their ties to take their first LSD trip, courtesy of a resident hippie drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher). As with the sprawling works of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, the sheer volume of characters--and celebrities portraying them--is often overwhelming, though Estevez succeeds in making each plot strand relevant to the story, if only to contextualise. While BOBBY is not a biopic per se, and will in no way be mistaken for a definitive statement on the man’s life and times, it is thoroughly adept at distilling both his message and the period of history in which he fought to deliver it.
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by THOMAS EVAN
