Bobby (2006 film)

The film recreates the ambiance of the era and invokes the hopes inspired by Kennedy through the use of actual broadcast and newsfilm footage of the senator intercut with dramatic sequences involving mostly fictional characters. It uses an ensemble plot device similar to that employed in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, and by Robert Altman in Nashville.

The characters include John Casey, a retired hotel doorman who spends his days in the lobby playing chess with his friend Nelson; Diane, who is marrying her friend William with the hope his marital status will get him deployed to a military base in Germany rather than the battlefields of Vietnam when his tour of duty begins; Virginia Fallon, an alcoholic singer whose career is on the downswing, her put-upon husband/manager Tim, and her agent Phil; Miriam Ebbers, a beautician who works in the hotel salon, and her husband Paul, the hotel manager, who is having an affair with switchboard operator Angela; food and beverage manager Daryl Timmons, whose racist attitude gets him fired; African American sous chef Edward Robinson and Mexican American busboys José and Miguel; hotel coffee shop waitress Susan; Jimmy and Cooper, Kennedy campaign volunteers who are sidetracked by an acid trip they take with the help of drug dealer Fisher; married socialites and campaign donors Samantha and Jack; campaign manager Wade and staffer Dwayne, who is in love with Angela's colleague, Patricia; and Czechoslovakian reporter Lenka Janáčková, who is determined to get an interview with Kennedy.

At the end of the film, Kennedy is shot after giving his acceptance speech. A man named Sirhan Sirhan would be convicted of the assassination. After being shot, Kennedy is cradled and protected by Jose until help arrives. As Kennedy's speech "On the Mindless Menace of Violence", delivered in 1968 to the City Club of Cleveland, Ohio, is played over the aftermath, it is revealed that Samantha, Daryl, Cooper, Jimmy and William are among those injured by Sirhan's wild firing. Sirhan is apprehended, while Kennedy is rushed into an ambulance (as are the others eventually), and everyone else is moved by the events that have just occurred. Closing titles reveal that Kennedy died of his injuries the following morning with his wife Ethel at his side, and the other victims of the shooting survived.

Christian Slater - who played Daryl Timmons in the film - at TIFF for Bobby's North American debut.

After an initial premiere at the NUIG Student Cinema at the National University of Ireland, Galway, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was shown at the Deauville Film Festival, the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, the Vienna International Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and AFI Fest before going into limited release in the US on November 17, 2006, and a wide release in the subsequent week. Playing on two screens, it grossed $69,039 during its opening weekend. It eventually earned $11,242,801 in North America and $9,461,790 in other territories for a worldwide box office of $20,704,591.[4]

As of April 2021, Bobby has an approval rating of 46% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 176 reviews, with an average score of 5.6/10. The consensus states, "Despite best intentions from director Emilio Estevez and his ensemble cast, they succumb to a script filled with pointless subplots and awkward moments working too hard to parallel contemporary times."[8] The film also has a score of 54 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 31 critics, indicating mixed or average reviews.[9] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average score of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[10]

A. O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that despite the director's "large and honorable task" and "entirely admirable" intentions, "The actors seem more like 'very special guest stars' than like real, 1968-vintage Americans ... Some of the stories feel too obviously melodramatic, while others are vague to the point of inscrutability. In the Vietnam- and drug-related plots, the point is hammered home too hard ... while other narratives wind toward no discernible point at all. Nonetheless the ambition behind Bobby is large and serious."[11]

Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times called it "an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way. It aspires for the Altmanesque interplay of Nashville or Short Cuts but instead feels like one of those '70s disaster epics such as Earthquake or The Towering Inferno, in which a star-studded cast endures melodramatic story lines as the audience awaits the inevitable momentous event and tries to guess who will be around at the finish ... It's easy to become swept up in the palpable enthusiasm Estevez shows toward his subject, but the pedestrian and overly expositional dialogue of the film's characters proves to be as stifling as the excerpts from Kennedy's speeches are stirring."[12]

Deborah Young of Variety said of Estevez, "Stepping up as writer and director in a way he never has before, [he] successfully pulls together a complexly designed narrative", and added the film "carries an eerie topicality that makes many of its insights instantly click."[13] Armond White of New York Press wrote that the film "has a humane sweetness", and that it "literally and vividly unites different ethnic groups, labor strata and social castes" in a way that "is not schematic—its exactitude and believability has a Tocquevillian brilliance."[14]

Steve Persall of the St. Petersburg Times graded the film C, calling it "a misguided jumble of too much fiction, few facts and zero speculation" and Estevez "a mediocre filmmaker".[15] Michael Medved, who was in the Ambassador ballroom (20 feet from the podium) the night Kennedy was shot, awarded the film three out of four stars and called it "intriguing but imperfect". He added, "Emilio Estevez gets most of the feelings of the occasion right. But, the melodramatic, multi-character format proves somewhat uneven and distracting."[16]

Richard Roeper said, "Estevez writes and directs with lots of passion, not so much subtlety ... [He] wants the movie to be on the level of a Robert Altman film like Nashville but falls short."[17] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film one star and called it "trite fiction" and a work of "insipid ineptitude". He ranked it among the worst films of 2006, as did Lou Lumerick of the New York Post, who dubbed it an "ambitious, but utterly wrong-headed trivialization."[18]

• JFK, a 1991 film by Oliver Stone detailing the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy's brother, President John F. Kennedy.
• Parkland, a 2014 film commemorating the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination.

• Bobby at IMDb
• Bobby at the TCM Movie Database
• Bobby at Rotten Tomatoes
• Bobby at Box Office Mojo
• Bobby at Metacritic