I’m automatically suspicious of a movie whose premise is that Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency may have been the last chance this country had to save itself. For one thing, Kennedy was running in the Democratic primary against Eugene McCarthy, who was much more outspoken about the Vietnam war and much more committed to withdrawing U.S. troops. I’m also wary of an attempt to drape Kennedy’s assassination in nostalgia for the 60s as a way to reflect on the present. But Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, set in LA’s Ambassador Hotel on the day Kennedy was shot, June 5, 1968, is so keenly felt and so deeply imagined I couldn’t help but be moved, even grateful for its bleeding-heart nostalgia—which winds up feeling rather up-to-date. I’m troubled only that Estevez minimizes or omits aspects of Kennedy’s life that don’t fit the idealistic image, such as his early work for Roy Cohn, chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy.
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Estevez unabashedly honors old-fashioned moral and humanist convictions. An early allusion in his dialogue to Grand Hotel suggests that he’s also honoring an old-fashioned kind of hokey filmmaking. And he honors both with polish and professionalism.
After seeing this movie’s premiere at the Venice film festival I defended its guts and intelligence to a French critic who described it as “sub-Altman.” I see it as “sur-Altman,” especially if compared to Nashville, another film with 20-odd characters that concludes with a cataclysmic and seemingly unmotivated assassination. Despite its reputation as an exuberant classic, Nashville knows zip and cares even less about country music or the city of Nashville (where it was shot)—which doesn’t prevent it from heaping scorn on both. It even ridicules a dowager who tearfully reminisces about John and Bobby Kennedy, and it shamelessly encourages viewers to share its contempt for the rubes. The relentless cynicism that Nashville brandishes as proof of its hipness ultimately gives way to glib, high-flown rhetoric in the climactic repeated shots of an American flag filling the screen while a nihilistic pseudo-country anthem, “It Don’t Worry Me,” builds to a crescendo, asserting the concert audience’s unembarrassed cluelessness.
Directed and written by Emilio Estevez
With Harry Belafonte, Joy Bryant, Nick Cannon, Estevez, Laurence Fishburne, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Joshua Jackson, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, and Jacob Vargas
