Bobby

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

He was part of royalty. Where his brother had fallen, he was supposed to pick up the baton and continue the family tradition. There was so much hope when he thrust his hat into the 1968 presidential campaign that people were expecting a landslide win once the primary was over. Yet on June 5, 1968, that promise was extinguished and Robert F. “bobby” Kennedy was gone. In writer/director Emilio Estevez’s motion picture “Bobby”, we see how America dared to hope for a brighter future as Kennedy made a run for the White House. We are also shown how, in the blink of an eye, that hope was taken away.

Set in the historic Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the ensemble cast represents different ethnic groups and social classes in the United States. This comes across as poignant when one considers how RFK gave such importance to race relations and civil rights during his lifetime. The cast includes veterans like Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte, Sharon Stone and Martin Sheen, as well as relative youngsters like Shia LaBeouf, Nick Cannon, and Lindsay Lohan. With such an eclectic cast, it is quite a surprise that Estevez (more well-known for his acting as well as dad Martin and brother Charlie Sheen) was the driving force behind it.

It’s even more surprising that Estevez and his crew pull it off. Apparently, Martin’s love for RFK during the 60s also affected young Emilio, so much so that Emilio was obsessed with making this film. It took him seven years to get the film made and he had to sell some original artwork and other items to finance the picture. If there was ever a labor of love, this was it.

Make no mistake, “Bobby” is a fictional account of the events that occurred on the night of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination. The cast are mostly fictional characters, amalgamations of other people or prevalent notions of the time. Still, Estevez was able to come up with a film that captures the tensions, the anticipation, the fears, and the social upheaval of 1968.

It might be too much of a stretch to say that one man could have changed history or the way America would progress if he had lived. That hasn’t stopped fans and people who have always loved the Kennedys from thinking that way for over 40 years. Although Robert F. Kennedy never ascended to the White House like his brother John F. Kennedy did, his tragedy was in some ways more painful for the United States. People back then saw in Bobby a solid chance to fix the racial divide and heal the country over the disaster of Vietnam. When he was gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan, hope seemed to just dissipate for an entire nation.

Estevez’s cast runs the gamut from old hotel employees to LSD-using junkies and FBI agents, from has-been entertainers to baseball-loving Latino busboys. Each person reflected an archetype, an issue that America faced and RFK was supposed to change if he won the election. We aren’t shown what happened to them after the assassination, this was a fictional account after all. We are only left with the haunting audio of Bobby Kennedy’s speeches, echoing across time as a sad farewell to a time of innocence and of hope unfulfilled.