Bobby
| Year: | 2006 |
| Production Co: | The Weinstein Company |
| Director: | Emilio Estevez |
| Writer: | Emilio Estevez |
| Cast: | William H Macy, Christian Slater, Heather Graham, Lindsay Lohan, Elijah Wood, Harry Belafonte, Demi Moore, Emilio Estevez, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Fishburne, Helen Hunt, Martin Sheen, Shia LeBouf, Joshua Jackson, Ashton Kutcher, Sharon Stone, Mary Elizabeth Winstead |
An epic attempt at an Altmanesque film on writer/director Estevez' part, and mostly it works in the same way Altman economically jammed a dozen or more major parts into the narrative.
Estevez cleverley does so by casting almost every major part with a well-known actor, making each strand of the plot interesting.
As a story it's simple - when Robert F Kennedy was shot dead in a Washington DC hotel other people were hit by the assassin as bystanders wrestled the gun from him. It's these people whose stories we follow in the day or so leading up to the assassination for no reason other than perhaps to frame them as markers of what happened to America, where everyone got hurt by Kennedy's shooting.
The shooting isn't altogether the point however, and Estevez takes the whole running time to set up these people and make us care what happens to them, from the feud between the manager (Macy) and the food service chief (Slater) to the girl (Lohan) marrying a friend to save him going to Vietnam (Wood).
The aftermath of the shooting is tragic as well handled as the film shifts focus, and although it hasn't given you any sense of it until then, it seems Estevez really wanted to make a movie about what he perceived as the death of America's last chance to be great.
Estevez cleverley does so by casting almost every major part with a well-known actor, making each strand of the plot interesting.
As a story it's simple - when Robert F Kennedy was shot dead in a Washington DC hotel other people were hit by the assassin as bystanders wrestled the gun from him. It's these people whose stories we follow in the day or so leading up to the assassination for no reason other than perhaps to frame them as markers of what happened to America, where everyone got hurt by Kennedy's shooting.
The shooting isn't altogether the point however, and Estevez takes the whole running time to set up these people and make us care what happens to them, from the feud between the manager (Macy) and the food service chief (Slater) to the girl (Lohan) marrying a friend to save him going to Vietnam (Wood).
The aftermath of the shooting is tragic as well handled as the film shifts focus, and although it hasn't given you any sense of it until then, it seems Estevez really wanted to make a movie about what he perceived as the death of America's last chance to be great.