Robert F. Kennedy once said, “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” Upon entering the theatre for a screening of Bobby, the fifth feature film from director Emilio Estevez (yes, the Mighty Duck man himself), I had but two thoughts: this can either be really good or really bad. Thankfully, the former is true.
The film centers around the events at the Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy’s campaign headquarters, on the day of his assassination on June 6, 1968. Among the 22 people whose lives we follow are a lush lounge singer past her prime (Demi Moore), the in-house beautician (Sharon Stone) who discovers that her hotel manager husband (William H. Macy) is having an affair with one of the operators (Heather Graham), a young woman (Lindsay Lohan) ready to marry a former classmate (Elijah Wood) to keep him from the front lines of Vietnam, and a racist kitchen manager (Christian Slater) overseeing a slew of minority workers.
The only person we do not see depicted is Kennedy himself. Estevez opts instead to expose the audience to him via archival footage, the grainy content of which contrasts nicely with the smooth, flashy cinematography of the film. It serves to remind us that Kennedy was a real person whose life ended before he could improve our nation in harsh times, as well as resetting a standard for 2008 political candidates.
With great difficulty to ignore my crush on him circa “Heathers,” I sat down with Slater to discuss the film. He seemed to agree with me on these points. “[Kennedy] had a way of communicating a kind of ancient wisdom in a way that made it relatable to what was going on today,” he said. “It ironically makes the movie more poignant in that it’s paralleling what’s going on in the world currently.”
It is hard to escape the comparisons to “Crash,” as both films involve an all-star cast featured in numerous vignettes, many of which involve racism in one way or another. Still, “Bobby” feels less like a two-hour PSA than a reminder that we’re doomed to repeat our past if we don’t learn from it.
The climax of the film, of course, is Kennedy’s assassination. Chaos ensues as the shots are fired and the guests run amok in the hotel, but the sounds are mostly muffled beneath the speech that Kennedy gave upon hearing of the assassination of Martin Luther King. His message of hope made Slater feel “ignited. I felt like I wanted to save the world.It may be even more powerful to hear these words spoken today because they are coming from a ghost. In a way, it’s almost as if [we are] being educated.”
(These were not the only grains of wisdom from Slater, however. His closing remarks to me were “Don’t cause too much trouble, take it from me. Ha-ha.”)
Not every moment in the film is as somber, however. The lighter moments in the film come from two Kennedy campaign staffers (Shia LeBouf and Brian Geraghty) who drop acid for the first time. Ashton Kutcher, in all of his Michael Kelso glory, plays the hippie drug dealer who turns them onto the drug and spouts off such phrases as “Are you ready to have a personal relationship with God?”
With such an all-star cast, it’s hard to select any standout performance, though two are worth mentioning. Freddy Rodriguez is stellar as Jos?, a Mexican kitchen worker who must sacrifice his tickets to watch Don Drysdale break the record for consecutive scoreless innings to work a double-shift. Anthony Hopkins also shines (as per usual) as John Casey, a classy and sentimental English gent who put in many years’ service as the doorman at the Ambassador.
My only qualm with the Breakfast Clubber’s opus is that the development for Helen Hunt’s and father Martin Sheen’s characters came too little, too late. Otherwise,
“Bobby” is a beautifully depicted character piece. To sum up my feelings about the film, as my friend so eloquently put it, “for an Emilio Estevez joint, it’s pretty good.”
