As big fan of all things Kennedy, I went into Bobby hoping for the best, but well prepared for the worst. Could Emilio Estevez, writer and director of Men At Work, really write and direct the kind of film that the legacy of Robert F. Kennedy deserves?
The answer, sadly, is no.
Instead, Estevez creates a by-the-numbers historical drama with too many plotlines that fails to even recognize that the most interesting aspects of the RFK assassination are Robert F. Kennedy and assassin Sirhan B. Sirhan.
Depicting the 24 hours leading up to Bobby’s murder, Estevez focuses his fragmented fictional account on the lives of the occupants and employees of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. There, on June 5, 1968, Kennedy, campaigning for the democratic presidential nomination, was shot at near-point-blank range in the hotel’s kitchen moments after giving a victory speech celebrating his win in the crucial California primary.
While choosing to concentrate on fictional characters in a film about a relatively recent event of major historical significance is really, really stupid, Estevez really shoots himself in the foot by crowding the story with at least 20 major characters (all played by recognizable Hollywood stars) interacting in over 15 intertwining plotlines.
It’s easy to see that Estevez wants to showcase Bobby’s ideological and personal influence on all classes of society. As a result, we follow racially charged episodes in the hotel’s kitchen, workplace adultery in the guestrooms and RFKs campaign on the street in front. Estevez ham-handedly goes for the, “How did Bobby effect the everyman?” approach by literally bringing in a representative from every possible demographic and showing you how they change as a result of the assassination.
Here’s the problem: these “ordinary people” are all played by huge Hollywood stars. Martin Sheen, William H. Macy, Anthony Hopkins, Lawrence Fishburne, Sharon Stone, Joshua Jackson, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore, Christian Slater, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan and yikes, Emilio himself are supposed to represent “ordinary people”? Why not use a cast of relative unknowns? With a relatively small budget of $10 million, you’d think they’d want to skimp on the talent (which, ironically, would probably have resulted in a better film).
If keeping track of who’s who isn’t hard enough, sitting through a parade of empty, and at times embarrassingly bad performances surely will be. Sometimes done-in by the cheesy, poorly-crafted, over-romanticized script (“somewhere in between our things and our stuff is us” muses Martin Sheen in one particularly sappy moment), and sometimes the actors are simply victims of their own ineptitude.
Lawrence Fishburne, who plays the kitchen staff’s own in-house Martin Luther King-pontificating his trademark brand of realistic optimism on race-relations-delivers a painfully long, overly-sentimental monologue about King Arthur after a Mexican kid gives him some free Dodgers tickets. It finally ends: “You, José, are a young King. Caring, kind, humble. Chivalrous act, chivalrous act indeed!” I wanted to laugh and puke at the same time.
I was also disappointed that Hopkins was particularly weak as the Ambassador’s retired doorman, delivering several lines that sounded misspoken or like bad takes. Generally, dialogue was flat and ill-timed, for which the blame should be shared equally among the director and the actors. Even Macy came off as flat, appearing at times to be severely overacting, something that instantly kills all realism.
But the film wasn’t all terrible. One subplot follows two young Kennedy campaign volunteers (played by Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty) who ditch their door-knocking duties to score pot off a dealer in the hotel. Instead, the beatnik dealer, (Ashton Kutcher) convinces them to drop acid which, needless to say, results in some very funny “coming of age” moments.
Bobby’s biggest flaw, by far, is Estevez’s decision to exclude Kennedy from the story. À la Jesus in Ben Hur, Kennedy (Mark Valley) is shown only in the background of fleeting shots, and his face is always obscured. This, coupled with the excessive hero-worship in the script makes Kennedy out to be some sort of unknowable, inaccessible deity, which is exactly the opposite of how he would have wanted it. A true man of the people, who regularly stumped on impoverished street corners, and purpose-fully traveled through neglected rural communities, Kennedy’s inspirational personality should have been the focus of this film, not a bunch of sappy archetypes created by Estevez.
One Kennedy movie that gets it right is Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days (2001), which dramatizes the events of the Cuban Missile Crisis from the perspective of President John F. Kennedy and his staff. In this film, a cast of relative unknowns (save for producer Kevin Costner, who unsurreptitiously wrote himself into the film) bring an ensemble of historical characters like Adlai Stevenson, Robert McNamara, Theodore Sorenson and Jack and Bobby Kennedy to life. Stephen Culp does an excellent job as Bobby, who was then serving as Attorney General and was one of his brother’s closest advisors. Culp wears the role like a second skin, so that every movement and vocal intonation makes you believe you are witnessing history. This is something that none of the stars of Bobby were able to achieve.
At Robert Kennedy’s memorial service, Ted Kennedy eulogized: “My brother need not be idolized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” This is exactly what Estevez misses. Estevez seeks to de-humanize the Robert Kennedy story, to have us care more about his fictional hotel guests than the man who would have beaten Richard Nixon in 1968.
Compared to Thirteen Days, Bobby is a huge step down. If this trend continues, audiences should prepare themselves for Teddy, written and directed by Rob Schneider and starring Norm MacDonald as the embattled Senator’s new rehab trust buddy.
