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Bobby (2006)

Director: Emilio Estevez

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Synopsis

Star-studded account of events in LA's Ambassador Hotel on the night that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Movie review

From Time Out London

Is that distant rumble the sound of Robert Altman turning in his grave? The ensemble approach of Emilio Estevez’s film about Bobby Kennedy – which focuses in jigsaw fashion on several characters on the sidelines of his assassination – has elicited comparisons with his late compatriot (as do most films with a scattering of vaguely related characters, from ‘Love, Actually’ to ‘Crash’). There the parallels end. Estevez’s film is a nostalgic, sanctifying and cloying study of the hours before the shooting of Kennedy in Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel on June 5 1968. His star-studded drama takes place entirely in and around the hotel, drifting from the kitchens through the lobby and to the bedrooms, and offers us plenty of sap but very little in the way of insight about Kennedy himself. The contrast between the starkness of the film’s archive footage – of Vietnam, riots, Kennedy – and the soapiness of the drama is awkward and distasteful. Moreover, Estevez presents his entire film through the prism of wishful thinking which makes for an oddly rosy view of the past and what might have been. As history, it’s corrupt.

While critics cite Altman, Estevez prefers to doff his cap to ‘Grand Hotel’ (1932) via a wistful line from Anthony Hopkins, who plays a retired hotel doorman. Just as ‘Grand Hotel’ invited much grandstanding from stars such as Greta Garbo, so in ‘Bobby’ a gaggle of celebs fight for our attention while Kennedy appears only in archive footage. There’s William Macy’s genial, liberal hotel manager (surely a reflection of Kennedy himself); Christian Slater’s aggressive catering boss; and Lindsay Lohan’s confused bride, marrying Elijah Wood to help him dodge the draft. Demi Moore is a drunken cabaret singer (and not very convincing either), married to long-suffering Estevez; Sharon Stone is a sad hairdresser; Laurence Fishburne is a chef who spouts mystical nonsense. Most perform solidly but few are well-served by Estevez’s script of forced emotion. Ashton Kutcher deserves mention for a disastrous turn as a hippy drug dealer that’s not helped by an embarrassing LSD sequence in which he and two naked Democratic Party workers hallucinate images of Vietnam and Nixon to a tune from ‘Hair’; it’s watch-through-the-fingers, hope-it-ends-very-soon stuff.

Estevez’s hope is that each character in ‘Bobby’ represents a different facet of America in 1968, so that together they offer a composite view of a nation on the cusp of change – should Kennedy have lived and won the 1968 Presidential election. It’s an ambitious, even admirable idea that isn’t matched by the script. ‘Bobby’ is hopelessly well-intentioned. It’s also inescaply reckless and fatally obsessed with shoehorning a celebrity into every corner. Its tales are soppy and wistful, one and all, and the contrast between the reality and the drama is hard to bear.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1901: January 24-30 2007

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