Bobby

Starring: Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne. Heather Graham, Anthony Hopkins, Helen Hunt, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, William H. Macy, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, Christian Slater, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood

Written by: Emelio Estevez

Directed by: Emelio Estevez

Distributor: The Weinstein Company

Rated: R

Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the early morning of June 5, 1968. Emelio Estevez’ historical drama Bobby focuses on the lives of some of the people who were there in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was shot. An accomplished actor in his own right, Estevez (who both wrote and directed the film) proves to be very much an actor’s filmmaker in a film featuring some extremely memorable performances by some very big name actors.

A particularly sophisticated William H. Macy plays Paul Ebbers: manager of the Ambassador Hotel. Ebbers is having an extra-marital affair with a young woman who works at the hotel switchboard (Heather Graham) unbeknownst to his wife Miriam (Sharon Stone) who works in the hotel’s beauty parlor. Miriam’s job finds her in conversations with numerous people, including an aging diva who is set to perform before Kennedy’s speech at the hotel (Demi Moore) and a young bride-to-be named Diane (Lindsay Lohan). Diane is marrying a military serviceman named William (Elijah Wood) in order to get him a relatively safe posting in Germany rather than dangerous, war-torn Viet Nam.

There’s nothing in Estevez’s script that is particularly poetic or original, but there doesn’t need to be. His strengths as a filmmaker lie in his ability to let the actors sink into the roles and be the characters they’re playing. Bobby is more about what isn’t being said by the characters than it is about the dialogue they’re speaking. There are some really great moments of cinematic silence here. Demi Moore is particularly convincing as an aging alcoholic celebrity in unspoken moments. Heather Graham’s switchboard girl cuts off her relationship with William H. Macy’s hotel manager without a single word uttered onscreen. We see her getting dressed after their final tryst and the silence completely defines the moment.

Estevez’s instincts as a director also seem to come from the ability to simply pair the right two things together, sit back and let them work. Harry Belafonte and Anthony Hopkins play aging doormen at the hotel. They work brilliantly together. Hopkins’ character is considerably sharper than Belafonte’s, but the juxtaposition between the two as distinctly different aging men forms one of the most striking interactions in the film. Estevez manages a similarly captivating pairing between Laurence Fishburne and Freddy Rodriguez as kitchen help at the hotel of two different socio-economically oppressed ethnicities. Fishburne is particularly powerful here, playing a memorably unpretentious kind of wisdom.

The film has its weak moments. A psychedelic journey for two of Kennedy’s campaign workers seems exquisitely misguided. Ashton Kutcher seems considerably out of place as a hippie drug dealer turning the two of them on to LSD. The depiction of a couple negotiating a long-time marriage as played by Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt seems equally out of place. Sheen and Hunt are great together, but their story never registers as anything more than an odd footnote to the rest of the film.

Bobby is also not without a tasteful amount of archival footage of its title character. We see Kennedy visiting an impoverished town. We see him delivering speeches. At the film’s climax, footage of him taken in the hotel just before and after his assassination is blended almost seamlessly with scenes filmed by Estevez. Bobby is a surprisingly moving look back at a moment in history. Its effect is that much more powerful because it looks at the people that a single, monumental moment affected rather than the event that defined it. VS