The wrong moment and the wrong style?

Emilio Estevez’s Bobby is a well-meaning but lackluster Altmanesque piece organized around people at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles up to and just after the June 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy, who that evening had just won the California democratic presidential primary. Even Altman didn’t always succeed, and what he did wasn’t easy. That began with the difficult choice of what setting and moment to choose for his interweaving of characters and incidents and voices. It’s certainly logical – if a bit naïve – to associate 1968 and the other Kennedy with a more idealistic world than the one we’re in now; but Estevez’s basic premise is still questionable to begin with: the characters who happen to be at the hotel on that evening aren’t going through anything from what we see of them that’s especially interesting. A lot of the time it seems the only reason we’re watching them is that they’re going to be in the hotel kitchen when Bobby Kennedy gets shot. That certainly isn’t enough to make us care about them.

Estevez may have wanted to present a microcosm of American hopes and aspirations or show how things went wrong at a pivotal moment; but the writing isn’t sharp enough to whip things into a coherent whole – or to provide the many name actors, hard as some of them are trying, with scenes that sparkle or stick in the mind. The movie’s pulse rate rarely rises and at under two hours, the movie still feels very long.

It’s the few minority characters who generate the most emotion. There’s good interaction between a black cook (Laurence Fishburne) and Latino workers (who are never seen doing their actual jobs) including stoical busboy José (Freddy Rodriguez); and one is touched by seeing an “angry” young black Kennedy campaign worker named Dwayne (Nick Cannon) have a brief moment of enthusiasm and recognition that turns to terrible despair when the assassination occurs. Alcoholic women and older men in downbeat or valedictory situations are less well served, perhaps because they emphatically represent no hope or course of action that relates to RFK or the aspirations Estevez associates with him.

To call this “ensemble” acting falsely implies skillful interweaving of subplots such as the real Altman of Nashville, Short Cuts, or Gosford Park could pull off so brilliantly. "Ensemble" doesn't just mean bringing together a lot of name actors. Estevez’s characters and their dialogue tend to be stereotypical. He works mostly with pairs of people who rarely connect interestingly with another group. A young couple (Lindsey Lohan, Elijah Wood) marry so the boy won’t get sent to Vietnam; two young male white campaign workers (Brian Geraghty, Shia LaBeouf) get high on acid and “waste” their day, thanks to Ashton Kutcher, horrible as a hippie drug dealer (he does Seventies, not Sixties, remember?) A drunken entertainer (Demi Moore) who's abusive with her husband (Estevez himself) connects with a burned-out, boozy beautician (Sharon Stone). Estevez’s dad Martin Sheen plays somebody important, helping his wife (Helen Hunt), who’s somebody too, buy black shoes. So what? The hypocritical hotel manager (William H. Macy) sleeps with a hotel phone operator and in a spirit of self-conscious liberalism fires the kitchen manager (Christian Slater) for exhibiting racist attitudes. It’s clear Estevez cares about the politics and moral contradictions of the time, but most of the time his characters don’t seem important or interrelated enough.

One trouble, for his Altman aspirations, is that Estevez doesn’t succeed in making the hotel seem like a living organism – as the hostelry does in the kitsch classic and Garbo vehicle Grand Hotel, which he makes the mistake in alluding to. (Partly this is because the Kennedy team have nothing special to do with the hotel.) So much was going on in America at this moment; only a fraction of it got into this picture. The period is evoked well physically but less well in language. A small instance: the bride-to-be says she’s “okay with” marrying her young man to save him from combat. But in those days people weren’t “okay with” things; things were “okay with” people. She would have said marrying him was “okay with” her. “I’m okay with” is a quite recent pattern of speech.

Actual footage of Bobby campaigning, of his California primary win reported on TV that evening, and of the chaos after the shooting, are skillfully woven in Bobby by Richard Chew; but resolutions of the various subplots are too rushed under the extreme pressure of the intense tragic finale. Bobby’s final minutes use as voiceover a speech RFK gave about violence. If this is meant to be an indication of the president we might have had, it fails. At 43 Robert Kennedy, after living in the shadow of his fallen brother, still seemed well meaning but unformed, and here we find him philosophizing rather than providing a concrete program. His speech condemns violence as a culture or way of life rather than seeking its causes; his conclusion that America needs a “cleansing” of this scourge carries an ominous suggestion of possible repression that reminds one of his authoritarian leanings.

To show how a cross section of Americans might have related to this time and this man would have required more space or more depth – and better writing. The tragic, chaotic finale seems a gratuitous payoff that’s sad without being meaningful in terms of the whole film. Bobby seems to express a sentimentalized doomsday mentality, as if to say “we had a chance but we lost it.” Maybe, or maybe not. If Estevez indeed had a chance here, he lost it too – though you can't blame him for trying.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.