Bobby

There was a time in recent history when young people had leaders that they could look up to and who inspired them to think of politics as a potentially noble professio... more >

There was a time in recent history when young people had leaders that they could look up to and who inspired them to think of politics as a potentially noble profession. Emilio Estevez’ film Bobby reminds us of one such man, Bobby Kennedy, who, with all his warts and contradictions, became the spokesman for a generation in revolt, and whose assassination left a gaping hole in our collective soul that has not been filled.

Bobby tells the fictionalized stories of 22 people who gathered at the Ambassador Hotel Ballroom on June 4, 1968, the night Kennedy was shot in the pantry after winning the Democratic primary and concluding his acceptance speech to a cheering crowd. Shown only through newsreel clips taken from his campaign for the presidency, we see the Bobby that stirred the nation with his progressive speeches. The film is unabashedly dedicated to celebrating Bobby’s memory and contrasting what he stood for with the emptiness of our present leaders.

Estevez has assembled an outstanding ensemble cast including William H. Macy as the Hotel Manager married to hairdresser Miriam (Sharon Stone) but having a clandestine affair with switchboard operator Angela (Heather Graham); Anthony Hopkins as John Casey, a retired doorman who engages his friend Nelson (Harry Belafonte) in chess and nostalgia; Freddy Rodriguez as Jose, a Mexican-American kitchen worker who is assigned to work a double shift and who gives his baseball tickets to Chef Laurence Fishburne as a gesture of racial harmony and Christian Slater as a racist kitchen manager who refuses to give his Latino employees time off to vote.

The main character of course is the one who could not be present, the one who was scheduled to be the heir apparent but was ruthlessly cut down by a murder that was neither random nor senseless but a frontal attack on our democracy and its citizens. < less

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