BOBBY
The Weinstein Company
Rated R
STARRING:
Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood
THE VERDICT:
Estevez’s amateurish direction and inclusion of too many characters make “Bobby” boring fare.
1/4 stars
June 6, 1968. The day of the California presidential primary. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was campaigning for the nation’s highest political office, an honor and burden that had left his brother slain in Dallas five years earlier.
His was a platform of “peace and justice” in a time when America needed both more direly than ever.
“This country is on a perilous course,” Kennedy warned. Vietnam raged on abroad, while the home front was ravaged by riots, revolts and racial disharmony. Kennedy was our nation’s last, best hope for idealism and reform.
RFK vowed that he would withdraw from the race if he didn’t win California. He did win. He announced his victory from the ballroom of his campaign headquarters, Los Angeles’ famed Ambassador Hotel. He delivered a typically rousing speech about working together to overcome “the disenfranchisement in our society,” made a peace sign with his fingers and flipped his hair away from his face in signature Kennedy fashion.
Moments later, he lay riddled with bullets in the hotel kitchen-America’s last, best hope gunned down by assassin Sirhan Sirhan.
The new film “Bobby” revolves around the goings-on at the Ambassador on the day of the assassination, but it’s less about Kennedy himself than you’d think or hope. Writer/director Emilio Estevez takes the hotel’s motto “a city within the city” and runs with it, turning the Ambassador into a microcosmic vision of the American mindset in 1968.
There’s the prim hotel manager (William H. Macy, never more stodgy or dull) and his beautician wife (Sharon Stone), who catches wind hubby may be cheating from a just-fired underling (Christian Slater, still alive) that Macy let go for refusing to let Latino kitchen workers out of work to vote (“Why let them off for something they can’t do?”). Freddy Rodriguez is the brightest-eyed busboy of the lot, stuck at work when he’d rather be at a Dodgers game, and Laurence Fishburne is a stoic, literate chef who refuses to be baited into racial discussions.
There are the campaign youths, from no-nonsense Joshua Jackson to angry Nick Cannon to Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf, who’d rather be watching “Planet of the Apes” on acid than steering voters to polls. The latter duo’s drug connection at the hotel is a hippie played by Ashton Kutcher, whose real-life wife Demi Moore shows up as the alcoholic talent half of a fading showbiz couple (Estevez himself is the long-suffering husband in a performance of unparalleled blandness).
And there’s a crusty, old doorman and his chess buddy (Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte), a young lady (Lindsay Lohan, looking older than her years) marrying a friend (Elijah Wood, looking younger than his) to keep him away from the front lines of Vietnam, a depressed stockbroker (Martin Sheen) and his materialistic wife (Helen Hunt) and a Czech reporter (Svetlana Metkina) wanting an interview for her socialist newspaper.
The film is overstuffed with characters, and one of the key problems with “Bobby” is that none of its strands, though a few have compelling premises, find steady footing as drama worth caring about. Many of the characters are stripped down to nothing but symbols and sketches (militant, prude, racist, angry young man), and it’s hard to become emotionally attached to characters you know next to nothing about (one doesn’t even know Sheen is a stockbroker until past the 90-minute mark, and then it hardly matters). As Belafonte moans, it’s a lot of “people coming, people going, nothing ever happens.”
Another crippling problem is Estevez’s directorial immaturity; his dour earnestness is a curse the film can’t escape. Estevez gives every scene a tone of overweight self-importance that the paper-thin melodramatics on display can never hope to sustain. He spends too much time setting up plotlines with no payoff (Fishburne, Macy, Moore) and not enough on the ones that might actually go somewhere interesting (the newlyweds and the doorman). The day-wasting campaign kids could have been insightful material, but here it’s just awful comic relief, replete with clumsily filmed freakouts and “dude-I’m-so-high-right-now” dialogue.
And there is that creeping liberal earnestness that overpowers everything else in “Bobby,” clobbering audiences over the head with painfully unsubtle metaphors and platitudes. Fishburne in particular gets saddled with numerous howlers. At one point, he reminisces about his grandmother’s famous cobbler and how he tried to recreate it himself-but his attempt “had no poetry, no light.”
And, oh, the modern political implications that abound throughout. There are obvious parallels to today’s American government such as a far-off war with no end in sight, waged for murky and dubious reasons that might be intriguing if they weren’t force-fed so bluntly and fumblingly. To balance out the jibes at Iraq, Estevez gives his own character a mouthpiece speech about how real men stay and fight things out and how “they don’t leave.”
“Bobby” is a long, dull movie that nevertheless feels shorter than it is, probably because of its utter emptiness and inconsequentiality. There are several powerful moments throughout, particularly during the climactic assassination, but they are few and far between. And it constantly shies away from questions that might actually provoke meaningful debate.
“Bobby” would rather canonize Kennedy than show his human side. Strange that one leaves the film knowing next to nothing about who “Bobby” was or why he idealized the things he did. One can sense from archival footage, without the aid of Estevez’s heavy guiding hand, that there was touch of some intangible greatness in this fallen leader, but nothing in the film points to concrete reasons why he was great.
As it is, “Bobby” strips down Kennedy to nothing but myth and whiffs of political smoke; it’s a wobbly monument to an extraordinary man who deserves a better legacy than an awful, star-filled soap opera.