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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Alas, poor Bobby, Dec 4 2006
Robert F. Kennedy was adored by the masses when he won the primary for the Democratic party, on his way to becoming the president of the United States. Then, like his presidential brother, he was gunned down in public. (That was WAY before I was born, so much of what I know comes from books)
Emilio Estevez doesn't exactly focus on that in "Bobby." Instead, he creates an elaborate "Grand Hotel"-style plot, focusing on the people who surrounded Kennedy on the last day of his life. The movie is a little scattered throughout the first parts, but Estevez yanks it together in time for the inevitable, tragic denouement.
The entire movie takes place on one day: June 4, 1968. The place: Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel. And there's as much drama out of the campaign as in it: For example, the manager (William H. Macy) is cheating on his smart beautician wife (Sharon Stone) with the switchboard girl (Heather Graham), but takes some time out to fire a racist supervisor (Christian Slater) because the guy won't let the black and Latin employees vote.
The doorman (Anthony Hopkins) and his pal (Harry Belafonte) play chess and talk. A lounge singer (Demi Moore) is struggling with alcoholism, a young girl (Lindsay Lohan) is marrying a guy she doesn't love (Elijah Wood) to keep him from going to Vietnam, and campaign workers drop acid. Their stories are only loosely intwertwined -- until Sirhan Sirhan arrives.
Estevez has created a movie that Tries To Have It All. It tackles racism, war, love, voting, women's rights, and the adored icons of an era. It also stars just about every kind of actor: veterans, Bratpackers, ex-sexpots, MTV stars, party girls and accomplished young actors.
In fact, "Bobby" spills over with plot and characters, and for the first two thirds, it seems that there is almost too much of EVERYTHING. But Estevez captures the you-are-there ambience, with crisp suits and longer dresses, neat hair, period music and the occasional baseball reference. For a day, you ARE in Los Angeles in 1968.
And he has a knack for creating a sense of foreboding and sadness, which hangs independently of the characters. Yet in some scenes where Kennedy is supposed to be speaking, the shining eagerness that you see in the audience's faces is enough to bowl you over. It captures the hope that was present during that era, and afterwards died quickly, as hope usually does.
The enormous cast makes it hard to single out one, but there are several good ones: Laurence Fishborne and Freddy Rodriguez as cooks who discuss the racism they struggle with, Macy as the manager who struggles to regain his lost youth by an affair, Stone as his faded beauty of a wife, and Wood's bittersweet, ironic portrayal of the young groom.
Kennedy himself is a nebulous figure -- most of what we see are archival clips, which show the young candidate's charisma and power. Although "Bobby's" take on him is rather naive, it does leave you wondering how he might have changed the US, had he lived.
"Bobby" is high on ambition, and Estevez manages to create a truly poignant, thought-provoking film. It has its flaws, but it also captures a shocking moment in US history.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Despite problems with emulating Thornton Wilder, "Bobby" still works as an elegy for RFK, Aug 12 2007
"Bobby" is written and directed by Emilio Estevez. As a young boy Estevez met RFK and clearly the assassination has resonated in his psyche. In one of the bonus features Estevez talks about wanting to find out about the other five people who were shot that night, which would make "Bobby" akin to Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey." Officially Sirhan Sirhan fired eight bullets, three of which struck Kennedy. However, there are several problems with this approach. The first is that a lot of people do not know that others were hit besides RFK that night. If I had known I certainly did not remember as I watched this film, which means I was not trying to figure out who the fateful five would be. Second, Estevez creates fictional counterparts for those five people and does not attempt to maintain key parallels between fact and fiction. For example, one of those wounded was an ABC News producer, and none of the almost two dozen characters that make up the mosaic of "Bobby" are reporters.
There are some historical aspects to what we see: one of the actual victims, Elizabeth Evans, had bent over to retrieve a shoe she had lost for a moment when she was hit in the forehead by a bullet. Obviously that idea is paralleled in the film, but that character is not a Democratic Party activist and friend of Pierre Salinger. A teenage Kennedy volunteer was one of those shot, but there is no reason to believe that he spent the day doing something other than canvassing for the candidate, as the film suggests. Another concern is that with the conceit of using actual footage of RFK from that fateful day providing a strong sense of verisimilitude, these fictional elements are given the ring of historical truth. Finally, despite the visual evidence to the contrary and the desired attendant irony, the scroll at the end of the film admits that all five of the people shot that night survived. By that point Estevez has taken his fictional elements too far and essentially derailed his film by clearly suggesting otherwise.
This is not to say there are not worthwhile aspects to "Bobby." The strongest part of the film has to do with José, the character played by Freddy Rodriguez, who is based on Juan Romero, the hotel busboy who had just shaken hands with RFK when he was shot (it is Romero who is shown holding Bobby's hand in the photographs and who gave him a rosary). José has tickets for the Dodgers game that name where Don Drysdale will be pitching his (then) record sixth shutout in a row, but because of the Kennedy celebration he has to work a double shift. His interaction with sous chef Edward Robinson (Laruence Fishburne), a character inspired by a piece of graffiti on the wall of the kitchen at the Ambassador Hotel, is at the core of this film.
There are lots of familiar faces making up the cast here, from Estevez's father Martin Sheen to Oscar winners Anthony Hopkins and Helen Hunt. I thought the two that stood out the most besides Rodriguez and Fishburne were Nick Cannon playing Dwayne, a young African-American campaign worker who is told he will get a chance to meet the candidate, and Lindsay Lohan as Diane, a young woman who is marrying William (Elijah Wood) to keep him out of the war (and, yes, the irony that a film that reminds us of what was lost when RFK was assassinated would also bear testament to the acting career Lohan has thrown away with her recent escapades is not lost on me either).
Despite these considerable objections I round up on "Bobby" because it does work as an elegy for RFK, as reinforced by the song during the end credits, "Never Gonna Break My Faith," written by Bryan Adams and sung by Aretha Franklin, Mary J. Blige, and the Harlem Boys Choir. Rarely does a song commissioned for the end of a film succeed as well as this one, especially in contrast to the use of Simon and Garfunkle's "Sounds of Silence" during RFK's speech right before the assassination (especially since there are references to "The Graduate" in the film which add to the ineffectualness of that particular song selection). On balance this 2006 film is not as moving as it could be, but it has its moments, mainly because time and time again Estevez lets Bobby speak for himself.
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Big Tobacco Has Big Influence, May 25 2007
Not much of a movie, mostly soap opera material. But what really stood out for me was the gross amount of smoking by the characters, every few minutes someone was lighting up. One scene had Demi Moore holding up a pack of cigarettes, just like a commercial, for about 4 minutes. For shame, to use the memory of such an icon to promote smoking.
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