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Bobby: Too Much, and Not Enough


It's been said we're in the age of the biopic, with top actors bringing celebrities from Johnny Cash to Edward R. Murrow to Ray Charles back to life on screen. But Bobby takes the model for the traditional biographical film and smashes it to bits. With an ensemble cast that appears to include half of the country's working actors — and with the title character's only appearance coming through archival footage — Bobby attempts to show what Robert F. Kennedy's death meant to '60s America through the eyes of 22 people who were at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles the night he was shot there.

It's an ambitious film with a noble goal, but Bobby ultimately is too much to take in without enough to really care about. To hear what I mean, read more

Bobby is full of A-list celebrities, and that's part of the trouble. It feels like a game of who's-who, and it's hard to get beyond "Hey, that's Lindsay Lohan!" and care about the roles they're playing. With so little screen time for each storyline, the characters never really move beyond caricature. There are the young campaign volunteers who ditch work to get high, the washed-up lounge singer, the girl who marries a boy so he won't have to go to war, the Mexican restaurant worker struggling to get respect. My parents told me the movie resonated well for them because the characters felt like people they actually knew, but for me, Bobby appeared to trot out the same '60s stereotypes I've always heard.

What Bobby gets right is the integration of the archival footage of RFK into the rest of the movie. Using that instead of an actor at first sounded risky to me, but it feels seamless, not hokey. And it really works at the end, when his victory speech plays over the scenes of the characters reacting to his shooting. You get the sense that the man who's just been gunned down really could have changed the country for the better.

The problem, of course, is that everybody already knows Bobby's going to be killed, so that alone isn't enough to hold our attention. It's up to the rest of the characters to carry the movie, and there's just too much going on in Bobby for that approach to work.

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