Bobby
Directed by Emilio Estevez
Emilio Estevez—fondly known as Otto by those forward-thinking people who consider Repo Man one of the best American movies of the ’80s—has directed and written Bobby as a personal follow-up to that indie landmark. Bobby has a humane sweetness that isn’t easy to sell (or find) in this cynical, fractionalized period of American social history. Set in 1968 at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel on the day Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, the film layers the multi-plot stories of the Ambassador’s many guests and employees. It may seem soap opera-ish (one character even name-checks the classic 1932 Hollywood movie-star melodrama Grand Hotel), but by paralleling anonymous lives with the famous slaying of a political hero, Estevez revives more than a genre; he resurrects a marvelous but forgotten cultural ethos.
Estevez uses footage from RFK’s campaign during the spring primary elections and excerpts from his speeches (notably, along with news footage of other social heroes like the United Farm Workers’ César Chávez). However, this is not an elegy for an idolized martyr as Oliver Stone made in the astonishingly inventive, politically radical JFK (a rare American movie done in the style of such firebrand political exposés as Francesco Rosi’s Exquisite Corpses and Costa-Gavras’ Z). Instead, in Bobby, Estevez uses the icon of RFK to reflect Americans’ everyday struggles and forgotten decency. He risks simply reminding viewers of a moment of relative American innocence—of hope mixed with serious misgivings about political catastrophe. Daringly compassionate and even optimistic, this vision is worthy of the politics learned by that post-punk, post-cynic Otto.
When Kennedy’s assassination finally occurs, it is not Bobby’s climax. Against the dread of political nihilism or existential chaos that critics favor, Estevez offers the terror we expect as a demi-crescendo—a twist on our cynicism. Several of the characters Estevez has introduced aren’t just witnesses, they’re thrust bloodily into the tragedy. Dull-minded reviewers don’t give Estevez credit for this modest yet meaningful triumph. It poetically suggests that many shared RFK’s wounds; in Estevez’s intense Catholicism, they bear the stains of shattered dreams. Estevez pulls off this coup as proof of what he learned from Robert Altman’s great omnibus films Nashville and Short Cuts and Altman’s most underrated masterpiece, that election-day jazz-melodrama Kansas City.
It’s been too easy for smarter-than-thou reviewers to deride Bobby as hokey; these are the same trendy camp-followers who quoted opportunistic dialogue from Revenge of the Sith (“This is how liberty dies—with thunderous applause.”) because, for the moment, it confirmed their own political pessimism. They’re rejecting Bobby’s optimism by belittling it as naive or inelegant filmmaking. Because these Borat-lovers prefer hollow, alienating fragmentation, they are not attuned to one of the greatest pleasure in Hollywood filmmaking: when movie stars play common, working-class people, they ennoble and humanize average American life.
Estevez literally and vividly unites different ethnic groups, labor strata and social castes. The abundance of types adeptly presents our national multiplicity. The Amassador’s staff comprises older and younger workers (Sharon Stone as a beautician and switchboard operators played by Joy Bryant and Heather Graham); a liberal manager (William H. Macy) and a bigoted supervisor (Christian Slater); Mexican kitchen workers (Freddy Rodriguez, Jacob Vargas) and a black head chef (Laurence Fishburne). Among the Ambassador’s guests are a second-rate, alcoholic singer (Demi Moore) and her entourage; a philosophizing young drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher); and a wealthy businessman and his trophy wife (Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt). The hotel is also packed with Kennedy campaign workers, a veteran pollster (Joshua Jackson) and a rookie (Nick Cannon) preparing for the evening’s post-primary celebrations; teenage canvassers (Shia La Beouf, Brian Geraghty); a freelance Czechoslovakian reporter (Svetlana Metkina); a young couple marrying to avoid the draft (Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood); plus retired hotel hangers-on—a doorman (Anthony Hopkins) and a visitor (Harry Belafonte).
This bubbling melting pot is not schematic—its exactitude and believability has a Tocquevillian brilliance. Like Repo Man, it observes America from the bottom-up, as workers and dreamers experience what history too often reduces to big moments. Estevez avoids the presumptuousness of Crash, making each character multi-sided and authentic. His main point is that we are indeed E pluribus unum. He shows a good actor’s understanding of autonomous personalities and the cast responds with game, vibrant performances. Any scene, duet or trio could be a favorite, but the way Lohan interacts with Wood is hard-core romantic. The mirror-image face-off between tough broads Stone and Moore is better than camp: It’s genuinely, powerfully poignant. The kitchen staff’s blueberry cobbler/civil rights lesson/baseball camaraderie scene between Fishburne and Rodriguez has a vivid sense of California’s underdog experience. It is one of the finest moments of cross-cultural, interracial fracture-and-empathy ever put on film.
In moments like these, Bobby maintains awareness that the personal is political. That’s why this social epic’s companionable title escapes mere hero-worship. Sweet-tempered Bobby makes the chastising point that how we live is not unrelated to the politicians we follow or scorn.
