Bobby
Directed by Emilio Estevez
Friends, if you love the powerful drama and riveting excitement of a hotel lobby, then–have I got a movie for you. About 45 minutes of the new ensemble drama Bobby takes place in just such a lobby and its immediate environs. Among the heart-stopping thrills: Retired doorman Anthony Hopkins plays chess with retired bellhop Harry Belafonte. Hotel manager William H. Macy stops by to offer friendly advice on how to move a rook before saying hello to his wife Sharon Stone, who runs the beauty parlor. Behind a door in an office sits Heather Graham, the world’s most beautiful switchboard operator, who’s sleeping with William H. Macy. Back in the kitchen, chef Laurence Fishburne makes the most delicious blueberry cobbler you ever ate. He gives some cobbler to, and gets Dodgers tickets from, a nice Mexican busboy who is being forced to work late by the vicious, racist food-service director, Christian Slater.
Also taking a stroll through on their way to the tennis court: married couple Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt. He’s a depressed stockbroker, and she doesn’t have the right shoes. In the wedding chapel, starlet Lindsay Lohan is a teenager who’s decided to get married to Elijah (Frodo) Wood. Meanwhile, over by the nightclub, songstress Demi Moore is boozing it up while her long-suffering husband Emilio Estevez suffers long.
Then, in the last six minutes, five of these people get shot. For Bobby is not set in just any hotel lobby. No, this is the lobby of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles–the very real place where Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 5, 1968. The five victims are innocent bystanders hit by bullets from Sirhan Sirhan’s gun. Writer-director Emilio Estevez made a mystifying dramatic choice: To tell a story about the RFK assassination that’s not about the RFK assassination, but rather about a bunch of extremely dull people who happened to be in the vicinity. This is probably no surprise, given that, in his career as both actor and filmmaker, Estevez has spent two decades giving new meaning to the word “pedestrian.”
Throughout the day at the Ambassador Hotel, we see RFK’s advance team making ready for the big victory party they’re going to have later on in the evening, when Kennedy wins the California primary. Two campaign workers joke about which cabinet posts they’re going to get. Two campaign volunteers slough off and drop acid in a room upstairs with Ashton Kutcher, who appears to be wearing a hippie outfit purchased in a Wal-Mart Halloween display. And a Czech journalist hangs around, hoping for an interview.
Kennedy is shown only in contemporary film clips (on two occasions, we are shown the back of Kennedy’s head). There’s a great deal of talk about how he is certain to be the next president of the United States, and about the great hope he has given to the poor and the meek and the struggling and the black and the white and the brown.
But what’s interesting is that the clips we’re shown, which are intended to display RFK as a secular saint, reveal only that he was exactly the same sort of politician we just saw in the hundreds across the country during the recent election season. He’s shown talking to children in awkward terms about the environment, using the “despair” of Americans in the industrial belt as a backdrop for a picturesque campaign appearance, expressing sorrow over the racial divide, and criticizing an unpopular war. The only surprising element is that, speaking extemporaneously, it appears his grammar was poor enough to make George W. Bush seem like Strunk, or maybe even White.
Thus, if you don’t come to the theater already disposed to believe Bobby Kennedy was destined to convert this troubled country into a utopia of egalitarian brotherhood, you may find it difficult to understand the reverential sentimentality with which the movie’s characters discuss RFK. Or why so many liberals have felt for the past 38 years that the killing of Robert F. Kennedy was the hinge moment in history that set America on the course to an evil conservative future. It’s not just the bad grammar that’s Bush-like; every word out of Kennedy’s mouth sounds like nothing so much as “compassionate conservatism.”
Bobby‘s broad brush evocation of the 1960s–makeup, clothing, interior decorating–always offers something entertaining to look at. The go-go hair extensions on the female performers are amusing; Demi Moore hits the stage with a half-decomposed Brillo Pad on her head as she warbles “Louie Louie.” And some of the acting is excellent, especially Sharon Stone’s.
The movie ends with a scene of the carnage in the kitchen of the Ambassador where Kennedy was shot, along with those five bystanders. (None of the characters shot in the movie is based on a real-life victim.) The only sound we hear is a gorgeously eloquent Kennedy speech bemoaning the violence in America and how terrible it is that we commit violence against each other. Kennedy, the movie is saying, was such a prophet that he prophesied his own death.
Only that’s not the story of his death. Kennedy was not killed in a random act of American-on-American violence. Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian, and the assassination was an overtly political act–Sirhan’s own contemporaneous diary entries demonstrate he wanted Kennedy dead because he thought RFK was too friendly to Israel. The Kennedy assassination was the first act of Arab terrorism on American soil.
But who cares about all that when there’s a ripping chess game going on in the lobby? Pawn to queen’s bishop three!
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
