Bobby

When Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, I was actually -13 years old.  I was not even a “glint in my father’s eye,” as it is said (though not in my mother’s, either, I imagine).  Suffice to say, I was not around.  But all it takes is just the right director with just the right movie to put me in the correct emotional state to feel what people where feeling on that night in 1968.  Bobby was that movie.

It starts with something very simple.  Bobby Kennedy was fatally shot in a crammed hotel kitchen right after delivering his victory speech for winning the California presidential primary.  There were 77 other people in that kitchen at the time.  Emilio Estévez, the director of Bobby, had a question to which the answer was ultimately this movie: “What about those 77 people?”

Now, the cast of this movie simply boggles the mind.  There are no less than 16 very famous faces in this movie, including two Oscar winners (Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt) and two nominees (Laurence Fishburne, Sharon Stone).  No doubt, under normal circumstances, this movie would have an astronomical budget from salaries for the actors alone.  The only explanations I can come up with for this movie getting made with so much proven talent are these:  all the actors are Estévez’s friends, or a film about Bobby Kennedy truly spoke to them, and they wanted to be a part of it.  Both are probably true.  Despite the out-of-this-world star power this movie has, no one really grabs the spotlight from anyone else.  I am astounded that this movie didn’t even get nominated for a single Oscar.  C’mon, Academy!  You love ensemble casts!

The closest things to standout performances come from Martin Sheen (the director’s daddy) and Anthony Hopkins.  Sheen plays a rich socialite who contributed to Kennedy’s campaign and who was treated for depression.  Helen Hunt plays his young wife, a very vulnerable and scared woman.  In each other, they rediscover the meaning of love.  Hopkins plays John Casey, semi-retired doorman for the Ambassador Hotel.  He and his friend Nelson (Harry Belefonte) are struggling with old age, and John deals with it by continuing to do a job that no one has required that he do in 25 years.  William H. Macy plays the hotel’s manager who is cheating with a hotel switchboard operator (Heather Graham) on his wife (Sharon Stone), who is also the hair and nail salon manager in the hotel.  Also in the mix are two high-level campaigners in the Kennedy campaign, played by Joshua Jackson and Nick Cannon, the latter of which is doomed to be an angry black man till the day he dies.  Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty play low-level campaigners who skip out on their door-knocking to get high on LSD sold by Ashton Kutcher, the three of whom provide the film’s comic relief.  In the kitchen of the hotel, Freddie Rodriguez and Jacob Vargas are both working double shifts as busboys.  Rodriguez has Dodger tickets he can’t use (Don Drysdale shattered a record that night by pitching 6 consecutive shutouts) that he gives to the head cook (Laurence Fishburne).  Vargas is upset at the racial inequality in this country that is keeping Mexicans down, but Fishburne offers a different and interesting perspective.  Svetlana Metkina plays a Czechoslovakian reporter who is very determined in her quest for just 5 minutes with senator Kennedy, but is blocked by Jackson’s character because she writes for “a communist paper in a communist country allied with the Soviet Union.”  To top it off, Lindsey “Disney Druggie” Lohan plays a young woman marrying a young man (Elijah “Frodo” Wood) solely so he won’t have to go to the front lines of Vietnam. Her confusion with the war is translated into compassion for him, but morphs into love.

And that’s not even everyone.  But the film parades all the characters out in front of you in a pretty easy fashion.  Because no one character has a very big arc, no one has a lot of screen time.  Arcs do exist, however.  Notable arcs are the ones Lohan’s, Cannon’s, Macy’s, and Sheen’s characters go through.  Almost everyone makes the most of limited screen time, and the editing is such that no one has the spotlight, yet no one seemed like they were short-changed.

But all that misses what Bobby is really about, and the reason it’s a great movie.  Bobby, more than anything else, is a snapshot of a time and place.  Bobby Kennedy is not an actual character in the movie (all his appearances are stock footage of the real man), and his assassin only has two appearances and one line.  That’s not what the movie is about.  It’s really about that turbulent turning point in American history, 1968.  The movie tells you about that time not through historical instruction or exposition, but rather through empathy.  It presents you with snapshots of several people living in that time, in the hopes that at least  one of them will connect with something you’re going through yourself.

Bobby is also about what, at its bare bones, the real Bobby’s campaign was about: that underneath all the strife, division, hatred, and miscommunication, America is a great nation made up of great people.  Flawed people, yes, but that’s part of what makes them great, and the nation great in turn.  The idea that we can put aside our differences and remember that we are all brothers, even for a moment, is revolutionary, even in this day and age.

Indeed, Bobby has relevance now that it didn’t when it was made.  Like Bobby before him, we have a presidential candidate who may have a unifying ability.  Barack Obama is a politician who, against all odds, is giving people hope for the future, and possesses a lot of promise to fulfill that hope.  Let’s just hope his fate is a lot brighter than that of Bobby’s.  Now, some believe that he’s just another suit and smile, that his program of positive change can never come true, and maybe they’re right.

But maybe they’re wrong.

Iconic lines:

“Clearance sale!!!  Everything must go!!!”

“You’re more than the shoes on your feet or the designer dress on your back.  You’re more than the purse you carry or the money inside it.  You and I are more than the stuff, more than the things in our lives.  Somewhere between our things and our stuff is us.  I don’t want to lose us.”

“Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”

22 rating: 16

Particle Man