Bobby
Written and directed by Emilio Estevez
The Weinstein Company
2006
Rating:


For all its flaws, 1932's Best Picture winner "Grand Hotel" is at least humble enough to realize it's nothing more than a sudsy excuse to parade out a calvacade of stars (Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, John and Lionel Barrymore) for no other purpose than to create an entertaining diversion. As the tagline pronounced, "Thank the stars for a great entertainment!" Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" is essentially no different, and those who haven't figured this out for themselves have it spelled out for them when retired doorman John Casey (Anthony Hopkins) compares Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel to the Edmund Goulding film.

Like "Grand Hotel," "Bobby" follows various stars as they filter through the hotel: the hotel manager (William H. Macy) cheats on his hairdresser wife (Sharon Stone) with a telephone operator (Heather Graham); "Dawson's Creek" alumnus Joshua Jackson and Nick Cannon campaign for Bobby Kennedy, who's staying at the hotel, while two Kennedy volunteers (Shia LaBeouf and Brian Geraghty) waste the day dropping acid with Ashton Kutcher; Laurence Fishburne, "Six Feet Under's" Freddy Rodriguez and Christian Slater experience "Crash"-worthy racism in the kitchen; Lindsay Lohan marries a drafted schoolmate (Elijah Wood) she secretly has a crush so he'll be sent to Berlin instead of Vietnam; Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt experience some thinly realized domestic problem; fading lounge act Virginia Fallon (Demi Moore) has a drug and coke-fueled breakdown, much to the chagrin of her husband (Estevez); and the doorman plays chess with an old friend (Harry Belafonte) and tells him stories he should already know.

"Bobby" only seems like it has a lot going on; in reality it features a small army of characters in search of, if not an author, at least some form of functional plot. In every respect the narrative reflects what one character thinks of his lodgings in "Grand Hotel": "People come, people go. Nothing ever happens."

Of course, "Bobby" is meant to be different. The entirety of the film is set on June 4, 1968, the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan (barely even glimpsed here). This places the film in a completely different context as it aims to be about something, specifically an allegory that attempts to connect the civil injustice and fears of war of the 1960s to the present. When "Bobby" does go political it does so clumsily, like Paul Haggis' "Crash" with an even more ambitious and more poorly executed agenda.

"Bobby" isn't up to the challenge Estevez sets up because so many of his movie's plot threads are wholly irrelevant to its thesis statement. By the time Sirhan Sirhan crashes the party celebrating Kennedy's victory in the California primary, Kennedy himself is already practically irrelevant to the movie. In the moments when Estevez stops his film and lets Kennedy speak for himself, Estevez only serves to remind the audience of how thoroughly he has failed in conveying the day when, for millions of people, hope died.

Posted Friday, January 5, 2007

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http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/bobby