Review - Bobby

Emilio Estevez’s film is obviously a labour of love on the part of the director, a peaen to the time when everything seemed possible for America, and a haunting account of the moment when all hope disappeared. The historical background to events, and their significance to today, is hammered home effectively; you only wish that he’d been able to wrap it around a better film.

The action takes place on that fateful day of June 4th 1968, and in the fateful place of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles. We follow a large selection of characters pulled from the staff and guests of the hotel in the run up to the senseless killing of Robert Kennedy. They are carefully selected to tick all the issue-boxes of the period, so we get ethnic tensions in the kitchen, emerging feminism in the bedroom, and anti-war sentiment in the wedding chapel. And of course the obligatory hippy. This is a portrait of a group of people in pain, a network of hurting individuals that we are supposed to get involved with; the musical interlude (to the excellent ‘Never Gonna Break My Faith’ by Aretha Franklin and Mary J. Blige, the only new song in a great contemporaneous soundtrack) evokes P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, an altogether more effective member of this genre.

The starry cast produces great performances, but they are let down by a lack of focus and memorable dialogue. There doesn’t seem to any point to it all. It is never made clear who Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt’s couple are or why they are there (it’s certainly not to entertain or move you). Demi Moore’s alcoholic singer is very miserable, and that’s her whole story. Estevez gives himself a part as her husband, the role consisting only of walking a small dog in a daze.

Of the myriad storylines, there are some that work: the love triangle surrounding William H. Macy, with Sharon Stone’s world-weary wife and a deliciously doe-eyed Heather Graham as the Other Woman, is sensitively portrayed. Anthony Hopkins gives a lovingly gentle and naturalistic performance as a retired doorman who can’t bear to leave the hotel, and Freddy Rodriquez is adorable as a decent and hardworking bus boy. The scenes with Lyndsay Lohan as the selfless bride saving her friend from the jungles of Vietnam are very affecting, until one realises she’s marrying Elijah Wood, permanently stuck in that 14 year-old awkward stage; this is bad casting that doesn’t ring true.

Bookending the film are montages showing the immense social upheavels of the period, the heart-breakingly moving words of Robert Kennedy, and the devotion he inspired in the American people. These are so effective that one wonders whether Estevez’s time would have been better spent making a stirring documentary, rather than trying to get his point across by throwing lots of characters at the screen and hoping they’d stick emotionally with the audience. They all pale in significance to what should have been the focus of the film, Bobby. This is a campaigning piece of work, and one that will do nothing to counteract the Sheen Clan’s bleeding-heart Pinko image, but Kennedy’s words are so painfully pertinent to today that it would be a hard heart that could fail to be moved. All this seems quite divorced from the main meat of the film, making it a strange concoction that has its charms and its moments, but ultimately doesn’t produce a satisfying whole.