Bobby

An ambitious labour of love from writer/director/actor Emilio Estevez, BOBBY depicts the hope, anger, and frustration that gripped the U. S. in the late 1960s. With the civil rights movement still reeling from the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the country stuck in a quagmire over Vietnam, Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign preached a message of peace and tolerance. Ironically, that message would be his undoing, when on June 5th, 1969, a day after winning the California primaries, he was gunned down by a Palestinian terrorist. The film’s Ambassador Hotel setting serves as a microcosm of class and race, with characters ricocheting off each other like charged particles, until the inevitably violent denouement. In the hotel’s kitchen, the mostly Mexican staff suffer abuse at the hands of their bigoted manager Timmons (Christian Slater). This doesn’t go unnoticed by hotelier Paul Ebbers (William H. Macy), who scolds Timmons for his racist behaviour. But Ebbers’ own conduct is not without reproach; he’s having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) behind the back of his beautician wife (Sharon Stone). Elsewhere, young Diane (Lindsay Lohan) prepares to marry her classmate, William (Elijah Wood), in order to save him from going to Vietnam, and two collegiate campaigners for Senator Kennedy remove their ties to take their first LSD trip, courtesy of a resident hippie drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher). As with the sprawling works of Robert Altman and Paul Thomas Anderson, the sheer volume of characters--and celebrities portraying them--is often overwhelming, though Estevez succeeds in making each plot strand relevant to the story, if only to contextualise. While BOBBY is not a biopic per se, and will in no way be mistaken for a definitive statement on the man’s life and times, it is thoroughly adept at distilling both his message and the period of history in which he fought to deliver it.