Bobby Review
When I rented Bobby, my expectation weren’t all that high because of all the bad reviews the movie had received. It does have an all star cast however including one of my favorite actors William H. Macy.
The movie centers around the day on which Bobby Kennedy was assassinated but you wouldn’t know that from the first hour and a half of the movie. The movie starts off extremely confusing following several story lines that don’t seem to have anything to do with one another. There’s the kitchen staff with a racist manager and ethnic tensions between the African-American cook and the Hispanic busboys; the switchboard operators who are underpaid, undervalued women (one of whom is played by Heather Graham who’s having an affair with William H. Macy’s character), an upper middle class couple played by Helen Hunt and Martin Sheen (Helen’s character is meant to show how women are forced to play the pretty wife role and has lost herself in the mix), a young couple about to get married so that Elijah Wood’s character won’t be sent to Vietnam, two young politically minded guys who get high with Ashton Kutcher’s drug dealer character (He plays a really bad hippy btw. Not believable at all), the famous singer and her husband who feels snubbed by her fame(the wife played by Demi Moore is an alcoholic), The hairstylist of the hotel who’s married to William H. Macy’s character (Again issues of women being controlled when he tells her who and what to vote for on each issue on the ballot), two old men playing chess talking about getting old, the waitress who wants to be an actress…These subplots are meshed together in a confusing manner that kept me wondering when something was going to happen up until the end.
Then bam, Bobby is shot and with him 5 of the main characters in the movie. Everyone is sad. There’s a voiceover of Bobby Kennedy talking about the divisions and violence in our society that I think is meant to tie everything together.
Now here’s why this movie was SO aggravating. RFK was shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who was upset with Kennedy’s support for Israel. The movie tries to connect it to problems within the US while it really was an act by a foreign born terrorist. Also upsetting is that Sirhan is not named in the film at all. The end credits only mention how Kennedy died in the hospital the next day and that the others shot all survived. For someone who doesn’t know the history of the situation they could come out of the movie thinking that the shooter was some crazy white republican or something. Why they chose to gloss over his background and reasoning for the shooting can only be accredited to an overweening political correctness on the part of the filmmakers. I can see why this theme would not be consistent with the overall "message" of the movie, but ignoring history to draw weak parallels with today’s politics regarding Iraq or the like is simply misleading.
My biggest surprise of the movie? Lindsay Lohan’s acting was actually decent and she wasn’t the reason why this movie sucked. Good job Lindsay!
All in all, this was one of the worst films I’ve seen in a long time. It is a total waste of time. Don’t rent it.
Tags: bobby review, robert kennedy, rfk, sirhan sirhan, movie review
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