Bobby
“Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” – Lloyd Bentsen, to Dan Quayle, 1988 vice-presidential debate.
I never got to meet the great Robert Altman, but I know his movies, and Emilio Estevez, you’re no Robert Altman. It’s amazing that Estevez, whose directing resume includes “Men at Work,” “The War at Home” and several procedural crime dramas for CBS, would even attempt to create an Altmanesque ensemble film with 22 major characters, but here it is, and it’s a disaster — flat and desultory and appallingly cloying. Estevez presents Robert F. Kennedy as a sainted figure, and he sketches the people who witnessed Kennedy’s assassination at the Ambassador Hotel with lumbering hindsight. They speak in stultifying proclamations, as if they were aware of the significance of their actions that day. Estevez doesn’t bring these people to life; he encases them in amber.
There isn’t a single intriguing subplot; many are embarrassing. Freddy Rodriguez, Laurence Fishburne and Christian Slater, as employees of the hotel’s kitchen, play out the racial tensions of the day with clunky, after-school special dialogue. Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood do the same for Vietnam. The hangdog William H. Macy is spectacularly miscast as the manager of the hotel — who’s married to Sharon Stone and cheating on her with Heather Graham! Macy has none of the swagger this alpha-male needs; he plays the part with his signature needy pathos. It’s rare to see an actor so out of sync with his character — but I don’t blame Macy, I blame Estevez. He also hangs his dad, Martin Sheen, out to dry. Sheen is married to Helen Hunt, and he’s depressed, and she’s responded by cultivating an obsession with fashion — and, huh? Their scenes just dawdle irrelevantly. But then very little is relevant. You’re forced to find your amusement where you can — there were a few moments with Ashton Kutcher’s cliched but energetic hippie drug pusher and with Stone’s world-weary beautician in which I wasn’t bored to distraction.
The documentary footage of Kennedy is the best thing in the movie. His obvious intelligence and his uncompromising progressive politics are striking. But Estevez has paid tribute to him in a laughably inept movie. I wish he had just made a documentary instead of telling the story of Kennedy’s assassination through a collection of thinly imagined, gasbaggy bores.
The only good thing about “Bobby” is that it reminded me anew of the genius of Altman’s “Nashville,” which is, among many other things, a response to both Kennedy assassinations, because it looks at the funk the nation sank into in the years afterward. Barbara Baxley’s heart-rending, improvised monologue about Jack and Bobby — which drew from Baxley’s own experiences campaigning for RFK — captures the lingering trauma of their slayings with raw emotion and idiosyncratic humor. These qualities are far beyond Estevez’s reach.