Movie Review

Film by Emilio Estevez featuring an all star cast of Anthony Hopkins, William Macy, Sharon Stone, Helen Hunt, Harry Belafonte, Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood, Martin Sheen, Laurence Fishburn, Demi Moore and Emilio Estevez, (Whew!) 119 Minutes, 2006

Initially, I was not interested in this movie. I avoided it when it was at the local theatre because I thought it would be a 'nostalgia flic' and besides, I knew the outcome! Heck, I'd lived in the story when I was in college and first started working. What could be new? Besides, it all happened 40 years ago.

The movie catalogues the events of June 6, 1968 in the Ambassadore Hotel where Robert F Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan as he was diverted through the hotel kitchen after giving a speech to his supporters in the ballroom following his winning of the California Primary. ("On to Chicago!")

The lives of 22 people are cleverly intertwined in anticipation of the arrival of Kennedy that night. The struggles of their lives give scale to what was seen to be an apocalyptic moment by many. Kennedy captured the hopes of those trapped in poverty, racism, sexism, the war in Viet Nam and recreational drug use. His death seemed to crush the perhaps, naively held, hope that a new era was about to dawn. To be honest, I found myself teary as I heard again the familiar cadence of Kennedy's voice.

Hopkins and Belafonte provide some comic relief as two retired doormen to the hotel who still hang around each day and relive the glory days but against the backdrop of their own failing health and memories. Elijah Wood is a young bridegroom hoping that his marriage to an earnest high school friend will get him a safer posting and he can avoid Viet Nam. Estevez plays a busboy in the kitchen who has tickets to the Dodgers' game that night but finds out he must work a double shift. He gives his tickets away to Fishburn, the cook, who calls it a 'chivalrous act'. (Drysdale pitched his record breaking sixth shutout in a row). Macy is the hotel manager and his wife, Sharon Stone, is the hotel beautician who knows that he is having an affair with Lohan, a hotel switchboard operator. So it goes, so it goes. Along the way people are nasty to each other or perform random acts of kindness. Kennedy's murder becomes a moment of reconciliation for many people, five of whom were themselves injured by gunfire, none fatally.

Kennedy has a prominent role in video clips of his speeches, still shots of his campaign and voice over the concluding credits. Sure, it was campaign rhetoric but the vision seems very apt for our own time, also a time of unpopular war, a time of huge cultural divide and of social unrest and protest.

Our lives on this planet are too short, the work to be done is too great to let this spirit flourish any longer. Of course we cannot banish it with a resolution but we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life...Surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our hearts brothers and sisters, citizens once again.

Kennedy clearly played the role of social prophet, "propounding an alternate vision to the vision of the dominant culture" and he paid the price so often exacted from those who adopt this role. Paradoxically, it is in the moment of his death that the people around him are driven to act out the vision that he propounds in the 'voice over'.

Bobby is much more than the 'nostalgia flic' I feared. It is funny and poignant with a contemporary political edge.