Bobby stars some of the
biggest, brightest, most talented stars in Hollywood … and Emilio Estevez (Take it easy
Emilio. We kid because we love. You married Paula Abdul and I couldn’t even
get a date with Paula Poundstone, so you win).
However, Bobby’s another movie that isn’t quite what you thought it was
going to be when you bought a ticket.
It’s a bland, pointless movie that happens to have a brilliantly emotional ending,
when Estevez finally gets around to focusing on Robert F. Kennedy.
In this totally fictional
story written and directed by Estevez, Bobby takes us back to the Ambassador
Hotel on June 5, 1968. It’s the day of
the California Democratic Party Primary, and a win by Kennedy could make his
bid to be the party’s presidential nominee a reality. As the day goes on, we see all of the people
who are in the hotel and take a look at this small slice of their life.
Jose (Freddy Rodriguez)
works in the kitchen and has to give up tickets to a Dodgers’ game. Sharon Stone is a hairdresser (pumped full of
all the botox America
will legally allow) who is married to the hotel’s well meaning manager, Paul (William
H. Macy). Anthony Hopkins is the long
time, but recently retired doorman, John, who has seen it all. Lindsay Lohan is a young girl, Diane, marrying
a high school classmate, William (Elijah Wood), so he doesn’t get sent to Vietnam. And so on, and so forth, and so on, until we
see Kennedy make his victory speech that night and attempt to exit through the
kitchen where he will be shot by Sirhan Sirhan.
The biggest problem that I
have with Bobby is that Estevez didn’t need to create cartoon, stereotypical,
60’s cliché characters to make up a story that had plenty of real people with
real stories who really were at the hotel and impacted by the real horrible
tragedy of that night. Maybe they didn’t
have movie star looks like Lohan or Demi Moore or Ashton Kutcher, or
movie-ready stories full of drama, but why make something up when the real
story is so important and has a connection to the main point of interest for
the audience?
Instead, we get the hippie
drug dealer (Kutcher), a couple of privileged kids using LSD for the first time
(Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty), the racist boss (Christian Slater) and more
that we have seen so many times before that they have no effect on the
audience, even when put into a story about very real events that changed the
course of American history. In essence,
Estevez sacrificed history for lame stories.
The only time any of it feels appropriate is when Estevez focuses the
story on some of the fictional characters who are on the campaign team or have
some tie to the campaign. More of that
would feel relevant, instead of people who never existed, or who happen to
wander into the path of history.
For all that Estevez may get
wrong about Bobby, the last fifteen minutes of the movie are shocking, moving,
amazing filmmaking that sticks with you long after you walk out of the
theater. Despite all of the dreck that
comes before it, Bobby excels as we see an extremely detailed recreation of the
assassination, and closes with a moving end credits sequence that features
images of Kennedy throughout the years.
Of all of the acting
performances in the movie, it’s Joshua Jackson, Nick Cannon and Christian
Slater that stand out to me. Jackson shows more
maturity in this role than we have ever seen from him as he plays the battle
hardened campaign staffer. He does a
great job portraying the weird mix of aloofness and religious-like devotion you
see in staffers when working on a campaign.
Cannon is very good and full of passion as the campaign worker who truly
believes Kennedy can make a change that will help bring an end to racial
discrimination in the country, while Slater portrays the other side of that
equation by giving us a racist villain (who is a little more complicated just to
make him interesting).
Bobby could have been
everything we hoped for, but Estevez had a different vision that isn’t as
awesome.
Copyright
2006 - WaffleMovies.com
Bobby is rated R for language, drug content and violence.
