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Grand confusion

Emilio Estevez's Robert Kennedy film is a narrative mess
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 21st, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Beginning of the end. The Ambassador went from headquarters to killing ground.
I came by my disillusionment with America in 1968, at the age of six. By then, I had already collected enough images of war and chaos to construct a rather disturbing children’s picture book of the world in my mind. And that book was only to expand.
It was an early June morning, and I awoke to the sound of the television blaring from our living room. My parents never had the TV on in the morning, and so I knew intuitively that something was wrong. I padded downstairs to the living room, where I saw that my mother had been crying. My father sat ashen. On the television a reporter was asking questions of a doctor who, with a small ruler, pointed to various spots on a model of a human head. Robert Kennedy had been shot.
With the death of Kennedy went the dreams of many Americans, and his message of hope and change for a damaged culture was given a rushed burial under Chicago, Cambodia, Watergate and the fresh wars and chaos that followed.
Bobby

Directed by Emilio Estevez
With Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Martin Sheen, William H. Macy, Christian Slater, Laurence Fishburne and Elijah Wood

Emilio Estevez’s film Bobby tries to capture the essence of the man and his message on the last day of his life, as a means of both reminding those of us who witnessed his death (and that slow, sad funeral cortege-by-train to Washington), and communicating to those not yet born, of all that was irretrievably lost on the evening of June 6, 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Estevez has structured his film with the classic “Grand Hotel formula,” where a set of individual lives within the Ambassador Hotel that fateful day come together collectively to create a historic moment. The formula is, of course, named after MGM’s film of 1932 that, shot a year and a half before Hitler’s rise in Germany, preserves the waning hours of Weimar while presciently suggesting the coming darkness.
Grand Hotel is referenced within Bobby’s first minutes, as the Ambassador Hotel’s retired doorman John Casey (Anthony Hopkins) banters with his old friend Nelson (Harry Belafonte), and repeats Lewis Stone’s ironic opening line from the older film: “People come and go. Nothing ever happens.”
From there, Estevez takes us into the hotel’s back stairs, guest rooms and what will become that terrible kitchen to begin collecting the stories of the people who will find themselves becoming supporting players in a tragedy.
There’s the hotel manager, Paul (William H. Macy), who is quarreling with his racist kitchen manager, Timmons (Christian Slater), while having an affair with one of his switchboard operators (Heather Graham) behind the back of his wife Miriam (Sharon Stone), who runs the hotel’s beauty parlor.
That seems complicated enough, but that’s only the tip of this all-star vehicle that includes Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood and even Estevez himself. Whereas Grand Hotel fashioned a complete epoch through five star performances (Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Wallace Berry and the Barrymore brothers), Estevez over-eggs the pudding with a bloated Airport-size cast (another film founded on the Ground Hotel formula). As a result, the characters become merely ’60s archetypes — or worse, ciphers.
Had Estevez narrowed his focus, Bobby could have been a powerful film. Five performances (that magic number from Grand Hotel) overcome the paucity of the script: Macy’s, Stone’s, Fishburne’s, Freddy Rodriguez’s and, surprisingly, Moore’s as a burnt-out lounge act.
The lack of general character development aside, Estevez is far too preoccupied with finding contemporary parallels to the ’60s, down to a gratuitous bit of comedy about hanging chads. You begin to feel that a swinging mallet is just behind you. Worse, upon this tipping waiter’s tray of narratives, the director sandwiches in a ludicrous musical number of an LSD trip.
Still, Estevez has a fine eye for period detail, and, though the end of his film offers a confusing POV, his re-creation of the assassination in the hotel kitchen is gripping filmmaking, down to restaging Bill Eppridge’s iconic photograph of busboy Juan Romero cradling the head of the dying Kennedy.
What one does walk away from this heartfelt muddle of a film with are the stirring words of Robert Kennedy himself. They’re a painful reminder of all the dignity, eloquence and intelligence that went with the man and, as my mother instinctively knew while weeping, went out of the country.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (21/02/2007):

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