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PLOT: Film follows the lives of people in and around L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel on the day in 1968 when U.S. Presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was shot -- among them: A boozy nightclub singer and her husband, a philandering hotel manager, the racist kitchen manager he fires, and two Kennedy campaign workers who take their first acid trip.
If a man's reach should exceed his grasp, full marks to Emilio Estevez for going all Robert Altman on us with his RFK paean, Bobby, and at least holding it together.
'Holding it together' might sound like faint praise, but you try writing and directing 22 characters into a two-hour movie, each with enough dramatic juice to make it worthwhile for Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Laurence Fishburne, William H. Macy and Martin Sheen -- let alone a B-team of Christian Slater, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Heather Graham, Shia LeBeouf and Ashton Kutcher.
It's more great engineering than great filmic literature. Estevez has come a long way since directing "classics" such as Wisdom and Men At Work, but the dialogue in Bobby is sometimes awkward, a mere framework for the actors to create characters in broad strokes -- as in the '70s disaster movies Estevez adored. Or a Love Boat episode.
What does Bobby Kennedy have to do with all this? The conceit is that the lives of people in and around the Ambassador Hotel on the day of RFK's assassination somehow capture the zeitgeist of 1968. It's a pastiche of idealism, humour, loss and sadness that oddly works (for me anyway; this seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it movie).
Scenarios abound, but the fulcrum could be Stone's character Miriam, the hotel hairdresser/counsellor whose hotel-manager husband (Macy) is having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham), a tryst witnessed by a racist bully kitchen manager (Slater) who'd been fired earlier that day when he refused to let his immigrant staff go out and vote, presumably for Kennedy. (Whew).
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Among said kitchen staff: Laurence Fishburne as a chef who speechifies on getting along in the white man's world, and Freddie Rodriguez as a busboy directly patterned after Juan Romero, the young Chicano cradling RFK's head in that famous picture.
Miriam's job also puts her in contact with other subplots, including Diane (Lohan), a girl who marries a soldier (Wood) to keep him out of Vietnam, and Virginia Fallon (Moore), a boozy, big-haired celebrity singer who's booked to sing to the Senator at RFK's victory party and who is mired in a hateful relationship with her ex-drummer husband (Estevez). Moore and Stone's sisterly scene together is getting much buzz as supporting-actress Oscar-worthy.
But what saves Bobby from being mere soap opera is the comic relief subplot of Cooper and Jimmy (Shia LeBeouf and Brian Geraghty), overworked RFK youth-campaign workers who chuck their campaign stickers on election day and get high. Their dealer (Ashton Kutcher, acting as if he's in a dream sequence on That '70s Show) guides them through their first acid trip, which is actually imaginatively filmed (there's some goofing with a cat litter box I won't spill here).
The tragic ending is obviously not a surprise. What is is how the pieces leading up to it all fall into place.
BOTTOM LINE: If a man's reach should exceed his grasp, kudos to Emilio Estevez for taking on too much. With so much great-actor muscle-flexing, characters are created in broad strokes -- like a '70s disaster film or Love Boat episode. Oddly, it works, creating a pastiche of idealism, humour, loss and sadness.
(This film is rated 14A)