Bobby
Somehow this manages to be simultaneously too much and not enough. I’d never really considered the story of Robert Kennedy, only knew he was assassinated like his brother, and I can’t say this movie enlightened me as much as I thought it might. I won’t go so far as to be so cynical as some and say it’s merely an excuse for a lot of actors to get together and slap each other on the back luvvy style – but, I won’t deny, that’s almost a valid criticism. That all these actors deliver uniformly fine, often terrific performances, and that the movie is technically quite dazzling at times, doesn’t seem to have struck those naysayers. I can’t help but think, though, that an Altman, Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, I even wanna say Roger Avary (some of the LSD stuff really reminded me of Rules of Attraction) could’ve done a much better job with the concept – yes it’s easy to be overly surprised that this all came, word and image, from Emilio Estevez, but the fact is, though it certainly has that “never saw it in him,” impact, it really only begins to be anything in its last half hour. Basically the whole thing comes down to, “Let’s get to know a bunch of random people in the same location so well that when the assassination unites them, we know exactly how they feel.” Well, that moment does resonate strong – but the road to it seems very laboured to me.