Bobby (2006)
Directed by Emilio Estevez
Written by Emilio Estevez
Starring Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Lindsay Lohan, Demi Moore, Elijah Woods
Release Date November 17th, 2006
Published November 17th, 2006
For most of its 2 hour and 10 minute runtime Bobby is a bad movie. The dialogue stilted. Extraneous characters crowd each other for screen time and lame montages remind us that the film is set in the 1960's, as if the death of Bobby Kennedy weren't enough of a reminder. That said, the last 20 minutes of Bobby take on the emotional equivalent of a giant boulder rolling down a hill. Somehow after all of the bad dialogue and bad characters, we find ourselves invested in the tragedy of it all.
Most of it is our own emotion about how Bobby Kennedy may have changed the world had not Sirhan Sirhan changed it in an entirely different way. There is no denying however, that what writer-director Emilio Estevez does with these last 20 minutes is powerful, affecting work. If only he could have done that with the whole film, I could actually recommend it.
On June 6th 1968 a joyous crowd of supporters and hotel employees awaited the arrival of Bobby Kennedy, the man many believed would be the next president of the United States. Kennedy established his California headquarters at Los Angeles' famed Ambassador Hotel and it was expected that night he would be there to celebrate his victory in the California Democratic primary. Indeed Bobby Kennedy did win the primary but moments after delivering his victory speech, Bobby joined his brother John in the annals of history, gunned down by an assassins bullet.
Emilio Estevez's Bobby is not about Bobby Kennedy and is only tangentially about the assassination. For the most part Bobby is a reassembling of the moment in 1968 when Kennedy was killed. Calling together a Love Boat sized cast of stars, Emilio Estevez wastes much time finding something for everyone to be doing rather than relating them all to the death of Bobby Kennedy.
The cast is far too large to detail who everyone is, Estevez himself can barely make time to give name to each of his many characters, better still to list just some of the Fantasy Island cast of Bobby. Sharon Stone, Lindsey Lohan, William . Macy, Nick Cannon, Heather Graham, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, Joshua Jackson, Shia Le Beouf, Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins, Christian Slater, Harry Belafonte and even a role for director Estevez as well.
With a cast this large; all Estevez can do is create a revolving door where characters are brought on screen at random and quickly shuffled off before we get to know to much about them. Many of the minor subplots created for these stars could, with great ease, be excised with no damage to the movie, and some edits would even improve the movie.
Take for instance Ashton Kutcher who plays a drug dealer who sells LSD to a couple of Kennedy volunteers. The LSD montage that follows is like a reminder that these things took place in the sixties. In case we may have forgotten, Nixon was the enemy, vietnam was bad and an LSD trip is always accompanied by psychedelic rock music and goofy camera angles. These scenes could be cut from the film and the only change to the movie would be removing Kutcher's name from the movie poster.
The same could be said of Kutcher's real life paramour Demi Moore. Moore plays a fading caberet star who performs in the Hotel night club. Her function is allegedly that she will be the one to introduce Bobby Kennedy that night. However, when the scene comes, Moore is nowhere to be found. Estevez uses historical footage of Kennedy taking the podium and delivering his speech.
Moore and Estevez's own role as her husband in the film are two more characters who could be easily eliminated to clear up some of the clutter that is the cast of Bobby.
The one actor who gets enough screentime and invests that time well is Freddie Rodriguez. The former Six Feet Under star plays Jose a young busboy who had planned on seeing Don Drysdale set the consecutive shutout record that night when he was told he was needed at work. When Bobby Kennedy was lead through the kitchen he came face to face with Jose and suddenly next to him, but unseen by him, a man with a gun. As Kennedy lay on the floor Jose is their comforting him.
The real Jose was named Juan Romero. He was just 17 years old, which makes the 31 year old Rodriguez an odd choice for the role. However, verisimilitude is not a big part of Bobby. Estevez changes the names of many of the people involved including those of the people who were also shot in the spray of bullets fired by Sirhan Sirhan. Why Estevez chose drama over historical accuracy is curious but inconsequential.
The best thing about Bobby is the ending of the film which manages to corral a few of the films many extranneous characters and turn a few of them into important players. Elijah Wood plays a newly married young man who ends up in the kitchen near Kennedy when he is shot. Helen Hunt as the trophy wife of Martin Sheen also ends up in that kitchen. Heather Graham and Joy Bryant in the ballroom deliver strong reactions. And Nick Cannon as a Kennedy volunteer with dreams of a job in the White House captures the emotion of the moment just after Kennedy was taken from the hotel.
These characters finally take on meaning as they become our emotional stand ins. The overwhelming emotions they express allow us identification and the opportunity to share in the grief of this history changing death. The reactions of these characters are played beneath the audio of one of Robert Kennedy's wonderful speeches about the devastation of violence and the promise of the future.
Is the movie cheating a little using Kennedy's speech to comment on his own assassination rather than crafting something of it's own? Yeah, maybe, but it works. So does the few moments of historic footage of Kennedy greeting throngs of people who lined up to see him wherever he went. Audio from his many speeches open and close the film making you wish that Estevez had simply made a documentary of this footage and audio rather than attempting to remake Crash with Bobby Kennedy.
Crash is indeed the template for Bobby. An expansive cast, plots that revolve and collide with one another and a moment of devastating connection. The difference is that Crash is more focused and far better written than Bobby. Crash writer-director Paul Haggis managed to place his cast in a context that was at once believable and dramatic. Emilio Estevez fails to create characters and situations that exist beyond types and what they represent of 60's culture. There is no emotional context until the last 20 minutes when the death of Bobby Kennedy draws some but not all of these characters into the same movie.
The ending of Bobby is undeniably powerful, but, for the most part, most of Bobby is simply a bad movie. Put in all the starpower you want, you can't magazine cover your way into a good movie. Bobby is stilted and awkward and meandering and despite the great ending, and the terrific work of Freddie Rodriguez, Bobby is far too messy and unfocused for me to give it a pass.
