Reviewed - Bobby:AFTER three modest cinema productions in the director's chair, multi-hyphenate Emilio Estevez has assembled a dream cast for his latest picture, an ensemble on a level more commonly associated with star-studded Biblical epics and lavish disaster movies.
For all the talent on show in the intimate epic that is Bobby, none of the actors is playing the eponymous character, Robert F Kennedy, brother of John and a serious presidential candidate in his own right when he was assassinated in June 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Kennedy is featured exclusively in the film through archival material chosen to celebrate his idealism and all the promise he offered in those turbulent times when - and here is the contemporary relevance - the US was involved in another unpopular war, in Vietnam.
Estevez has constructed an adept and elaborate screenplay, set in that hotel over the day and night before Kennedy was killed, and he layers his movie with multiple overlapping stories involving fictional characters in the hotel at the time. This proves mildly distracting initially as he brings on so many established, rising and re-emerging actors.
There is William H Macy as the hotel manager, and isn't that Sharon Stone as his beautician wife and Christian Slater as his racist catering manager? And Anthony Hopkins as a lonely, retired hotel doorman, Demi Moore as an alcoholic singer and Estevez himself as her husband. And Ashton Kutcher as a hippie who turns two naive young Kennedy campaigners on to LSD, Lindsay Lohan as a bride marrying a friend (Elijah Wood) to save him from Vietnam, and Freddy Rodriguez, who steals the film as an immigrant working a double shift in the kitchen.
Espousing the liberal values he inherited from his father, Martin Sheen (who also features as a hotel guest), Estevez laces these neatly juggled storylines with heartfelt sorrow for Kennedy's fate on the day he won the Californian primary. As his thoughtful, poignant movie judiciously mixes the personal and the political, it inevitably raises the intriguing question: what if RFK had lived to run against Richard Nixon in the presidential election five months later . . . ?
