Bobby, We Hardly Knew Ye

The other night we watched "Bobby," which was written and directed by Emilio Estevez (who also has a small role). Were it not for one very important thing, I would have quickly dismissed this film for the same reason I dismissed "Crash" way back when: Even if you manage to assemble a dozen of today's best actors, it's not easy to give each one a tiny role and then successfully tie them all together in a compelling way (unless you're Robert Altman, that is). We just don't get to know them well enough to care about them. Helen Hunt, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Anthony Hopkins, and Bill Macy in particular turn in really nice, tight little performances, but it's not enough. (And some of the mini–plot threads flat-out didn't work for me—Lawrence Fishburne is a terrific actor, but I'm just not buying a black restaurant cook in the '60s who pontificates like a Rhodes scholar; I didn't care one whit about the two campaign workers who drop acid for the first time; and so on.) You'd be hard-pressed to name someone who isn't in this movie (Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, Ashton Kutcher, Harry Belafonte, Christian Slater, Shia LaBeouf, and on and on), and yet the sum of the parts ends up being less than the whole.

So, what redeemed the movie for me? RFK himself. I get tongue-tied and starry-eyed when I think about him. The smartest thing Estevez ever did was to resist casting an actor to portray Bobby; instead, we get all that well-worn, never-tiresome footage of the great man himself. No actor could have possibly captured his passion, his compassion, his eloquence, his charisma, his commitment, and his honesty. Even in real life, who out there today can even come close to Bobby? (The last really moving speech I can recall was Mario Cuomo's DNC address in '92.) Estevez misstepped at one point and ran footage of RFK and various civil rights and anti-war clips with "The Sound of Silence" playing in the background—I groaned aloud at the cheesiness—but otherwise he let Bobby do the talking. I later found myself scouring the Web for transcripts of some of his better-known speeches (read this one for a major shiver up and down your spine), but watching and hearing him deliver the speeches is  positively transcendent.

So, all in all, I'd say this film is a failure, because we're forced to spend an hour with a whole bunch of people we don't care much about. But then we get those last 10 or 20 minutes, the all-Bobby channel, and it seems like it might have been worth the wait. The immediacy and enormity of that moment when all hopes were dashed is truly stunning.

Comments

[LPD]

I think you just gave a few reasons to steer clear of this movie:
Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, Ashton Kutcher, Christian Slater, Shia LaBeouf.
;)

[Deb C]

I really enjoyed the movie in spite of Elijah Wood, Lindsay Lohan, etc, etc. I watched it twice and cried both times, but then again I loved Crash as well. To each his own.