View image Wayne Newton and Suzanne Pleshette -- er, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore stud the all-star cast of "Bobby."
We're told that Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" takes place at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, but it feels like it was originally released back around then. It's "Earthquake" with the RFK assassination as the disaster. It's "Airport." It's "The Towering Inferno." A whole bunch of familiar actors play "colorful" characters swarming around the hotel, and their day will culminate in the death of a Kennedy. They talk about the movies -- new stuff like "The Graduate," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Planet of the Apes" -- but a retired doorman played by Anthony Hopkins explicitly invokes the model for "Bobby" and and its ilk: "Grand Hotel," the 1932 picture with Greta Garbo and an all-star cast. And "Bobby" treats the assassination as an event as strangely distant from its own present-tense as "Grand Hotel" was from 1968.
Sure, the requisite modern political parallels are present, as they are in virtually every film at the Toronto Film Festival this year. On the screen, on TVs in hotel suites, over the soundtrack, are actual speeches and sound bites from Democratic senatorial candidate Robert F. Kennedy, talking about how the country has lost its way in the quagmire of Vietnam, and championing rights for minorities and low-wage workers, etc., etc., etc. (It comes as a bit of a shock to remember that politicians were once articulate and sounded like they knew the meanings of the words they were saying.)
But why make "Bobby," which screened at the Toronto Film Festival as a "work-in-progress"? Why turn this traumatic national event into a Hollywood soap opera? The performances are fine for this kind of glitzy manufactured melodrama ("Where Were YOU When They Shot RFK?"), and on that level it's swell, trashy fun. It's just that the whole concept is inappropriate.
Christian Slater (maybe the weakest performance, as the villain) is a racist kitchen manager who makes Latino busboy Freddie Rodgriguez work a double shift, when he was planning to take his dad to see Don Drysdale pitch a record-setting shutout that night. Laurence Fishburne is a wise pastry chef who dispenses blueberry cobbler and speeches about how to cure racial strife with equal skill and generosity. William H. Macy is the liberal hotel manager who reprimands Slater for not giving the employees of the understaffed kitchen time off to vote. Meanwhile he's having an affair with Heather Graham, a hotel operator, even though he's married to Sharon Stone, the hotel beautician. Stone's two main customers are Cocoanut Grove headliner diva Demi Moore, a washed-up lush who's giving the final performance of a long engagement, and Lindsay Lohan, who's marrying her friend Elijah Wood, that very evening, to keep him from being sent to Vietnam.
Get the shape of things to come? Ashton Kutcher is a drug dealer working out of a room in the Ambassador who gives a pair of young Kennedy volunteers their first hi-larious LSD experience, while campaign coordinator Joshua Jackson thinks they're out driving elderly people to the polls. Helen Hunt and Martin Sheen are a married couple who are in town for what they hope will be that evening's victory party, but first they must work out some marital issues because she needs shoes and he suffers from seeing a psychotherapist. Meanwhile, Hopkins plays chess with his old friend Harry Belafonte in the lobby... It goes on like that, flitting from one mini-confrontation to another (dramatic or comic relief -- choose one). "Bobby" would like to be "Nashville," but it's pure Irwin Allen, not Altman.
7 Comments
Still, quite a cast.
Le sigh. When I first heard of [i]Bobby[/i], the first thought in my head was the wonderful, lamenting dialogue in Nashville about "those Kennedy boys," and that perhaps such a tragedy could provide some sort of artistic illumination, or even just a damn good movie. Now it seems like a TV movie of the week for a bunch of actors in need of a paycheck.
Sounds more like "Honky Tonk Freeway" to me... seriously, this sounds like the kind of misguided project that could become a future camp classic!
Long live future trivia crap!
Irwin Allen meets Robert Altman! I can't wait to see this! I would love to see next McCabe & Mrs. Miller on the Land of the Giants!
It’s rare when a decent movie has ever been made when a bunch of actors come together for something they “really believe in.? It seems like what always happens is the actors always play these over the top characters that come off way too campy to be taken seriously. Crash, All the King’s Men, and now Bobby.
I completely disagree with you. I recently watched this movie and it really moved me! I thought it was written really well and the acting was great!
"It's just that the whole concept is inappropriate.."...this is such a critics thing to say.....this makes you sound like a very jealous wannabe director.
who are you to say what someone, especially an artist, wants to talk about...who are you to define what is or what isn´t important or appropriate to an artist of any kind????
this statement by you is really inappropriate...
admit that you have no right to speak about someones work in those terms...be another artist....talk gently about them as inspired/creative/intuitive children in a very ugly and jealous world filled with critics who can´t help but try to destroy their babies....
if you can´t be creative....get a job as a critic...it´s a parasites way of getting food.
JE: Or, it's a person's honest response to a movie shown to an audience. Those babies belong to everyone once they're out in the world, asking people to buy, rent and appraise them. Should we in the crowd just keep our opinions to ourselves, or can we open that up to a free discussion?
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