Bobby

[Penelope]

This is good news. I've seen fine comments elsewhere, particularly for Sharon Stone--would be nice to see her score a Supporting nod--I know there are some here who don't like her, but I've always been a fan (yes, even as far back as King Solomon's Mines in 1985)--I love her what-the-hell attitude, her joyful glamour, and her quintessential ability to raise even the worst projects (Diabolique, Catwoman) to some kind of watchability.

[Mister Tee]

This film wasn't even on my C-list of best picture possibilities. But the combination of this trifecta of good trade reviews and Harvey Weinstein's involvement shoots it, improbably, to near the top of the charts. Barring a far more negative response from critics in Toronto, I think we have to consider the eerie possibility of an Emilio Estevez directing nomination.

[Sonic Youth]

Two more reviews:

Bobby
By DEBORAH YOUNG
Variety

Viewing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy through the eyes of guests and staff in the hotel where the senator was shot on June 5, 1968, Emilio Estevez's "Bobby" is a passionate outcry for peace and justice in America that becomes deeply involving by the final climactic scene, overlaid with one of RFK's most stirring speeches. A warm reception at Venice, followed by a Gala bow in Toronto are well timed to put the picture in the spotlight during the serious-minded fall (and election) season, taking the same route George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck" took to galvanize a following.

Though its principle constituency is bound to be liberal audiences, the film can count on strong nonpartisan appeal thanks to one of the starriest casts in recent memory: Anthony Hopkins (also an executive producer), Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Lindsay Lohan, Martin Sheen, Helen Hunt, Christian Slater, William H. Macy, Elijah Wood and Estevez himself. Overseas box office should be particularly strong given cast and political slant.

The print screened in Venice lacked complete end credits and a key end title song described by the director as an "anthem about hope" written by Bryan Adams [Uh-oh.] and sung by Aretha Franklin, among others. This addition is, however, unlikely to offset the elegiac closing mood, in which Kennedy's own voice rings out with an inspiring vision for America, bringing down the curtain on an emotional high.

Stepping up as writer and director in a way he never has before, Estevez successfully pulls together a complexly designed narrative intertwining newsreel footage of RFK with mini-stories about 22 fictional characters. Each story reflects on the zeitgeist of the '60s, including its films and pop culture, racial and class tensions and the Vietnam War. Not all the stories are equally engrossing, but collectively they create a buzzy atmosphere a la "Grand Hotel," which is specifically cited.

Though Estevez's script predates 9/11, it carries an eerie topicality that makes many of its insights instantly click. Archival footage shows young soldiers being brought home in body bags from Vietnam, "a war no one understands"; police checkpoints in Watts keep voters from getting to the polls; illegal immigrants are underpaid, despised and angry.

Film opens on an electrifying collage of newsreels that sets the scene in 1968. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot to death in Memphis, five years after John F. Kennedy's assassination; Los Angeles' glamorous Ambassador Hotel is about to become the scene of another tragedy. RFK's presidential election campaign, still in the primaries, is in full swing, and the New York senator is awaited in the hotel that evening for a speech.

At this point politics takes a back seat as fiction takes the wheel. The hotel is awash in ordinary people living out their private dramas on that fateful day. Retired doorman John Casey (Hopkins) passes the time playing chess with his old friend Nelson (Belafonte). The hotel's liberal manager Paul Ebbers (Macy), who is quietly married to beautician Miriam (Stone), fires his racist manager, Timmons (Christian Slater).

Singing in the hotel that night is fallen star Virginia Fallon (Moore), an alcoholic who abuses her husband, Tim (Estevez). Virginia literally lets her Liz Taylor-like hair down in a salon scene with the level-headed, humorously dolled-up Miriam that touches on the theme of women's position in society. The same note is sounded in the fashion anxiety of Manhattan socialite Samantha Stevens (Hunt), who finds a reassuring presence in her depressed husband Jack, played by Estevez pere Martin Sheen.

The kitchen staff are largely Mexican-Americans like the honest young Jose (Freddy Rodriguez), forced to work a double shift on the night Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale is going for a record. As the wise chef Edward (Fishburne) intuits when the youth makes him a gift of his tickets, Jose is a noble soul destined to play a role in history.

Estevez's screenplay also stresses numerous acts of generosity; the untiring labor of angry Kennedy aide Dwayne (Nick Cannon) earns him the gratitude of RFK, and along with Fishburne and Rodriguez, Cannon poignantly and vividly embodies the civil rights struggle of the time and RFK's concern for the underprivileged.

Female idealism finds its heroine in young Diane (Lohan), who bucks her family to marry her schoolmate William (Wood) and keep him out of Vietnam. Both popular thesps are so low-key, it takes a moment to recognize them. In a softly comic role, Russian actress Svetlana Metkina limns an earnest Czech journalist who finds her interview request with RFK rebuffed by an aide (Joshua Jackson) on grounds she's a Communist.

A little over-stretched but still quite funny is an extended skit featuring junior Kennedy stompers Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf, who let themselves get sidetracked into an LSD trip by hippie pusher Ashton Kutcher. As the film comes into the home stretch and Kennedy's date with destiny approaches, all the fictional stories begin to seem superfluous, suggesting a further trim may be in order.

Michael Barrett's widescreen lensing embraces soft, muted period colors that blend in with production designer Patti Podesta's ingenious re-creation of the Ambassador Hotel, which was being torn down while filming was in progress. Almost the entire film is shot on Steadicam, a choice that updates its Grand Hotel narrative model with a documentary edge and allows it to melt into the well-chosen archive footage.

Richard Chew's editing skill peaks in the film's dramatic finale, which switches back and forth in rapid shot/counter shot between Kennedy newsreels and the film's actors. The images are movingly overlaid with the senator's prescient speech, delivered after King's assassination, on ways to end violence in the world

In the soundtrack at Venice, the '60s were carried into the soundtrack with over-familiar chestnuts like "White Rabbit" and "California Dreaming," which have been better used elsewhere.



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Bobby


Lee Marshall in Venice
Screendaily


Dir/scr: Emilio Estevez. US. 2006. 119mins.

Actor-director Emilio Estevez makes a convincing return to feature direction with Bobby, an all-star choral drama set in Los Angeles’ Hotel Ambassador on the day Democratic candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated there. True, it is not one of those auteurist multi- strand films like Magnolia that provokes and challenges its audience; rather it’s better thought of as a hipper, more politicised take on the Grand Hotel genre. But the film’s potentially slight stories, which follow 22 fictional guests and staff staying or working in the Ambassador on June 4, 1968, are neatly glued together and given depth, by the impending tragedy.

Bobby’s quiet resonance, which takes a while to build, also comes through the plot strands’ thematic links (which spotlight, for example, the changing nature of male-female relationships), and by the way they act as a sign-of-the-times barometer to an America that many then believed to be on the verge of revolution.

Commercially, this is a smart and tasty product, with its universally excellent all-star ensemble cast (a strong contender for those awards, like the Golden Globes, where multi-actor prizes are allowed), its stirring nostalgia for a lost era of ideal-fuelled politics and its canny mix of emotional drama, liberal message, and gentle comedy.

It should certainly strike a real chord in the US (it enjoys an LA/NY release on Nov 17 after playing Toronto), where the Kennedy brand is still high-profile; internationally, it will be the star names that pull in the punters. Overseas marketing campaigns would do well to stress that this is not a worthy biopic about the slightly less famous member of America’s most famous family, but an ensemble drama that captures that era.

Bobby was presented in Venice as a work in progress, but at the press conference Estevez confirmed that only the final credits and a theme song performed by Aretha Franklin still needed to be added, also quipping that “any film you make with Harvey Weinstein is going to be a work in progress”. The running time given above is therefore likely to be extended by another five minutes – though it would be better to bring the film in under two hours by tightening up some of the limper light-relief scenes, like the LSD-trip subplot, or the folksy chats over a game of chess in the hotel lobby between two retired hotel porters, John Casey (Anthony Hopkins) and Nelson (Harry Belafonte).

A brief full-screen caption sets the timelock: it’s June 4,1968, voting day in the California primaries for the Democratic presidential candidate. Frontrunner Robert Kennedy has already booked the ballroom of one of LA’s most venerable luxury hotels, the Ambassador, for that evening’s victory party and press conference.

Hotel manager Paul Ebbers (William H Macy) is helping to get things ready, though he takes time out to pursue his affair with pretty switchboard operator Angela (Heather Graham), while his wife Miriam (Sharon Stone) paints nails, cuts hair and soothes troubled souls in the hotel’s beauty parlour – including that of Diane (Lindsay Lohan), a bride-to-be who is getting married to her young college friend William (Elijah Wood) to save him from being sent to Vietnam.

Other denizens of the Ambassador include drink-sodden chanteuse Virginia Fallon (Demi Moore) and her long-suffering, henpecked husband Tim (played by the director); good-hearted Latino kitchen boy Jose (Freddy Rodriguez) and his older mentor, the wise sous-chef Edward (Laurence Fishburne); Jack Stevens (Martin Sheen), a depressed older businessman from the East Coast who has brought his much younger, fashion-obsessed wife Samantha (Helen Hunt) to LA on a second honeymoon; and two young Democratic party campaigners (Brian Gerarghty and Shia Lebeouf) who embark on their first LSD trip when they should be out hustling for votes.

The baton is passed from story to story with reasonable grace, while Michael Barrett’s photography uses the widescreen format interestingly against type to engender a sense of claustrophobia: the frame becomes the hotel itself, a pressure-cooker microcosm of US society in the year The Graduate was in cinemas, Martin Luther King was assassinated and songs like California Dreaming (which features on the soundtrack, along with a handful of other iconic period anthems) were in the charts.

What Estevez lacks in visual flair as a director (if anything, it’s his well-honed script that may get an Oscar nod), he makes up for in the performances he coaxes from his actors. Demi Moore and Sharon Stone stand out: Moore’s Fallon is not a stage drunk but a conflicted, arrogant, insecure woman who drinks so she doesn’t have to face herself, while Stone gives Miriam an emotional depth that can only have been hinted at in the script.

No actor plays Robert Kennedy: his election campaign and new-found commitment to America’s dispossessed is shown through newsreel footage, which is spliced seamlessly into the action, particularly in the dramatic final assassination sequence.

The chaos of the moment is conveyed by jerky handheld camera movement, while the loss to the nation is brought home by the original campaign speech that plays out over these scenes of panic and desperation, in which Kennedy talks about the violence, the income gap, and the ethnic divisions that plagued his country. Few audiences will resist the obvious hint that Kennedy’s words apply equally well to the USA in 2006.

[Sonic Youth]

Bobby

By Ray Bennett
Hollywood Reporter

VENICE, Italy -- Set among the guests and staff at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day in 1968 when presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was murdered, "Bobby" is a sentimental love letter from writer-director Emilio Estevez to his hometown and the slain politician. A well-crafted piece with a large ensemble cast featuring some big names, the film's success will depend on whether audiences respond to its rose-tinted view of Los Angeles in the late 1960s and its clear belief that RFK was a saint.

With its strong liberal bias, the picture will appeal to nostalgic left-leaning audiences in the U.S. It might well prosper internationally as it presents a very different face of American politics from the one on offer from the current administration.

Estevez obviously is one of the many who believe that Bobby Kennedy traveled from his bullying younger days via the Damascus road, picking up an epiphany along the way that made him America's last great hope following the death of Martin Luther King Jr.

"Bobby" features many clips showing RFK addressing campaign audiences and by the time he ran for president, he was certainly talking the talk. Its preamble also uses real footage to set the scene showing bombs falling in Vietnam, the march on Selma, President Johnson's resignation and the Cesar Chavez protests.


Estevez focuses, however, on the people at the Ambassador who include hotel fixture John Casey (Anthony Hopkins), who will reminisce about its glamorous history at every opportunity and always has time for a chess game in the lobby with his old pal Nelson (Harry Belafonte).

There's also hotel manager Paul (William H. Macy), who is married to Miriam (Sharon Stone) but having an affair with Angela (Heather Graham), one of the switchboard operators. Well liked and a committed Democrat, Paul fires the hotel's racist catering manager, Timmons (Christian Slater), after he declines to let his staff of blacks and Latinos off work to vote.

Estevez does a good job of cutting between many story elements that cover Kennedy's political team at work. In the kitchen, blacks and Latinos strive to get along. Guests include a businessman (Martin Sheen) and his self-conscious younger wife (Helen Hunt); a drunken singer (Demi Moore) and her unhappy husband (Estevez); a young woman (Lindsay Lohan), getting married to save her groom (Elijah Wood) from Vietnam; and a would-be actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), who works in the coffee shop and tries to help two very stoned Kennedy volunteers (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf), high on LSD purchased from a whacked-out dealer played by Ashton Kutcher.

The dialogue is heavy with aspiration and regret. Laurence Fishburn has a good scene lecturing on racial pragmatism. Hopkins and Belafonte reflect wryly on growing old, and so do Stone and Moore, though in a very different way.

Cultural references are used cleverly with Los Angeles Dodger Don Drysdale's effort to achieve six straight shutouts on everybody's mind, and people talking about such films as "The Graduate" and "Planet of the Apes."

Cinematographer Michael Barrett captures Patti Podesta's production design in expert fashion. Editor Richard Chew helps Estevez keep all the identities clear as the events of the day gather pace. Mark Isham's score is as expert as usual.

As the climax nears, Simon and Garfunkel's "The Sound of Silence" plays. Whether or not Bobby Kennedy was the man his supporters believed him to be, the film makes a persuasive case that something important in America was silenced when he was gunned down.