Bobby (**1/4)

? Writer-director Emilio Estevez’s long-in-the-making labor of love features an all-star ensemble cast playing fictional characters who all wind up in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, when Senator Robert F. Kennedy is shot to death following the California primary.

+ Without critiquing each of the half dozen or so storylines, I’d say that the two most noteworthy performances and/or characters are delivered by Sharon Stone, as an understanding hairdresser, and Lindsey Lohan, whose character is about to marry a young man (Elijah Wood) she doesn’t know all that well so that he can avoid going to Vietnam. Where an ensemble piece like this could easily descend into hokey melodrama, this is more like a slice-of-life film. For the doorman played by Anthony Hopkins, the day is mostly another occasion to play chess with an old friend (Harry Belafonte). For the boozy nightclub star played by Demi Moore, it’s another night of arguing with her manager/husband. Some of the storylines do intersect in unexpected ways.

- This is kind of like a highfalutin’ version of one of those disaster movies where we meet a bunch of characters, then twenty minutes later their cruise ship turns over or something and we get to watch them interact and try to save themselves. Only in this case, the beginning part is the whole movie and the disaster comes at the end, and then the movie just stops. Interspersed with the fictional events are historic footage of Kennedy, and the end is a montage of photographs of RFK at various ages, many also including JFK and Ted Kennedy. (This montage elicited a small cheer from the preview audience when I saw this.) If it hadn’t been for these insertions and the last ten minutes, the movie mostly could have almost as easily been set the day Martin Luther King was assassinated, or, for that matter, the day the Beatles released the White Album. It’s not that I think Estevez executed his idea poorly. It’s more like that, having watched this movie, the idea seems half-baked in the first place. Unless the storylines were truly going to be tied in to its ostensible main subject, then it just comes off as a cheap ploy to invest the story with significance. The only historical fact I learned from this movie was that the same day as the primary, Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale was trying to extend his historic streak of shutout innings. This provides the story for one character, a kitchen worker who has tickets to the game but is asked to work a double shift.

= **1/4 Maybe it’s just that I would have liked to actually see a movie about RFK himself, who would surely make a worthwhile subject for a feature film, but my impression was of some watchable moments adding up to less than their sum.

IMDb link

viewed at PFS screening