‘Bobby’ uneven but riveting
Published 9:00 pm Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Robert F. Kennedy isn’t actually the focus of “Bobby,” the new movie named for him. No actor plays him in the film, and when he does appear it’s in newsreel footage and voice recordings.
Still, the spirit of RFK looms unusually large in this film, making it an emotional experience for anyone who remembers this most unusual politician.
The rest of the movie, which opens Thursday, has its share of problems. Writer-director Emilio Estevez had an interesting idea here: follow two dozen characters in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day of June 4, 1968. That’s the day Kennedy won the California presidential primary, the big prize on the way to winning the Democratic nomination that year. After making his victory speech in the Ambassador that night, Kennedy was shot in the hotel kitchen (along with some bystanders) and later died.
The idea is intriguing, but the interest level generated by the various characters (played by an all-star cast) is, to say the least, uneven. The miniature soap operas include a hotel hairdresser (Sharon Stone) who learns that her husband (William H. Macy), the hotel manager, is having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham).
There’s also a bride (Lindsay Lohan) set to marry a friend (Elijah Wood) to keep him out of the draft, plus a boozed-up singer (Demi Moore) performing at the hotel lounge. Estevez himself gives one of the film’s best performances as her husband-manager, a quietly exasperated fellow.
Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, appears in a particularly dreary subplot with Helen Hunt. (Sheen played Robert Kennedy in a great 1970s TV-movie, “The Missiles of October.”)
The film fares better when focusing on a Hispanic kitchen worker (Freddy Rodriguez), who has interesting relationships with a chef (Laurence Fishburne) and a bigoted boss (Christian Slater). We get some decent comedy with two RFK campaign workers (Shia LaBeouf, Brian Geraghty) who drop LSD for the first time thanks to a hippie (Ashton Kutcher).
There are many more folks around – Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte among them – but you get the idea. The film appears modeled after the classic Robert Altman ensemble style, but comes up short on insight and old-fashioned melodrama.
Estevez’s do-gooder spirit can be heavy-handed, and you could criticize a technique like playing “The Sounds of Silence” beneath a montage of 1968 violence.
On the other hand, I can’t deny the power of that montage. Nor the moving use of Kennedy’s speeches, including the beautiful speech RFK gave on violence the day after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., in April 1968 (“Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force…”). Good luck trying to think of a current politician capable of giving a speech like that.
“Bobby” is very well photographed, by Michael Barrett, and has a breezy flow from scene to scene. Some of it was shot at the actual Ambassador, which has since been demolished. For all its faults, I was absorbed in this movie … but mostly because of the reality, not the fiction.
Stars of the film “Bobby,” which opens Thursday, include Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Sharon Stone, Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt.
