Bobby

Dir: Emilio Estevez

2006

***

You've got to hand it to actor turned director Emilio Estevez for actually completing Bobby, a look at the people and events surrounding the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June 1968. Estevez encountered many issues in making the film, the toughest challenge being writers block. After speaking to a woman who was actually there on the day of the assassination and who worked at the Hotel, Estevez had his first character (who was played by Lindsay Lohan in the film) and the rest soon fell into place. The cast is an impressive mix of actors most of who have worked with Estevez at one time or another. It includes Harry Belafonte, Mary Winstead, Laurence Fishburne, Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, Ashton Kutcher, Shia LeBeouf, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Estevez's Dad Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood and Estevez himself, as well as many more actors who have since gone on too much success. The characters are mainly fictional, each representing an element of society in the late 60s and the political unrest of the era. Estevez has each character explore topics such as drugs, racism, war and marriage. We see characters marry out of convenience to prevent other from being drafted into the Vietnam war, Mexican busboys comparing the way they are treated compared to others, a washed up entertainer, a retired doorman, a young black man making his way up the political ladder, a drug seller and two young men experimenting with acid for the first time and many other sub-plots that go some way to show life in 68', what the attitude, hopes and fears of the people were, in the run up to the presidential election. There is something very Robert Altman about the film but it's not quite up to the same standards. When it's good it’s great but it is bad, it's really frustratingly so. There is just far too much going on, it's an amazing cast but it's just a little too crowded, with many of the stories and characters getting in the way of the overall plot and fluidity of the film. The scenes in the kitchen and raw and quite powerful, the drug taking scenes are pretty bad generally and Ashton Kutcher's hippy drug dealer nearly ruins the whole movie in my opinion. It's so close but boy does it need editing, shame really as the use of old footage mixed with new is very effective.