Bobby
By Jacquelyn Curtis
|
Director: Emilio Estevez |
Bobby is an interesting blend of drama and biography. Based on the assassination of U.S Senator Robert F. Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in 1968, the film follows the lives of 22 fictional characters on the day of the tragic event.
Sharon Stone plays the hotel beautician, making over a drunken lounge singer played by Demi Moore. Ashton Kutcher is a strung-out hippy on acid who leads a pair of election door-knockers astray. Anthony Hopkins is a retired Ambassador doorman who just can't let go.
Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt play a distant married couple who are trying to reconnect with each other, while Lindsay Lohan's character is marrying a man she hardly knows to prevent him from being sent to Vietnam. William H. Macy plays the hotel manager, who oversees the racial tensions within the kitchen in his hotel and hopes Robert Kennedy might bring about change.
Through the interweaving lives of the characters, Estevez's screenplay touches upon many of the issues at hand in 1968 including dissent at the Vietnam War, racial violence, drugs, political instability and disillusionment in the American government.
| It is an enormous feat to assemble such a large cast who play a wide range of characters and not lose the audience |
The film stalls a little initially as it sets up and introduces the numerous characters, but Estevez does well in avoiding deliberating on any one character too much, making each set of characters and their relationships as interesting as the next.
It is an enormous feat to assemble such a large cast who play a wide range of characters and not lose the audience. On the contrary, the plentiful sub-plots only serve to further the messages of Bobby himself – peace and tolerance.
The final moments in the film are incredibly moving as archival footage of the real event is spliced with Estevez's climax, all of which plays out to the sound of one of Robert Kennedy's finest speeches.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
