Saturday, November 25, 2006
The film's soundtrack includes some of Bobby Kennedy's speeches.
By ROBERT W. BUTLER
KANSAS CITY STAR
Of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, Bill Tuttle says: "I'll never again have that kind of enthusiasm for a political candidate."
"He totally blew me away," Tuttle, now a professor of American Studies at the University of Kansas, recalled. "Here was this national politician who sat in the shotgun shacks of poor tenant farmers in Mississippi. Who fasted with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. Who thought the war in Vietnam was a huge mistake.
"He gave us hope."
Less than two months later, on June 6, Kennedy was assassinated at Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel shortly after winning California's Democratic presidential primary.
That day is the subject of "Bobby," an unabashedly emotional film from writer-director-actor Emilio Estevez. In the drama, the lives of 22 fictional characters -- campaign volunteers, rich political supporters, Hispanic kitchen workers, hotel guests, a beautician, a switchboard operator -- intersect in the hours leading up to the assassination.
Kennedy himself is seen only in old newsreel footage. But even when he's out of sight, other characters talk about him, about the war, about race, about America.
Using Kennedy's words
Bits of Kennedy speeches waft through the movie's soundtrack. The senator talks about compassion and generosity and the obligation of Americans to care for one another. The oratory is earnest and straight from the heart, a form all but abandoned in today's instant commentary, market research and spin doctoring.
He is running, Kennedy says in one clip, "not merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies. ... I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done, and I feel that I'm obliged to do all I can."
"Bobby" is an emotional eulogy to what might have been.
"Liberalism died with the assassination of Bobby Kennedy," presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said recently on "CBS Sunday Morning."
Filmmaker Estevez, 44, admits that his portrait of RFK is overwhelmingly positive. Troubling moments in the man's r & eacute;sum & eacute; -- his alliance with Red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, his fierce attacks on James Hoffa and the Teamsters, his reputation as a ruthless advocate for his brother Jack -- aren't mentioned.
"This film is about that one day," Estevez said. "All that stuff about the ruthless Bobby -- it was true. He was like that early on. But the death of his brother brought on a transformation. Bobby remade himself."
Though he was only 6 years old when Bobby Kennedy died, Estevez had already met the man at a political rally in New York City.
"I was on my dad's shoulders" -- his father is actor Martin Sheen -- "and Bobby reached out and shook my hand."
When the family relocated to Los Angeles, Sheen took his son to the Ambassador and showed him the pantry off the ballroom where the senator was shot.
"Dad told me, 'This is hallowed ground,'" Estevez recalled.
Years later Sheen played Bobby Kennedy in a TV miniseries about the Cuban missile crisis. Estevez was on the set as Sheen researched for the role.
Made the decision
But it wasn't until 2000, when Estevez returned to the now-abandoned Ambassador for a photo shoot, that he felt the weight of history.
"That was the moment when I thought, 'Why hasn't anyone told this story?"'
Years earlier his father had given Estevez a volume of Bobby Kennedy speeches on cassette tape. Sheen had done the lead-in narration.
"What I heard blew my socks off," Estevez said.
Despite its high-caliber cast, "Bobby" was a low-budget film by Hollywood standards. The players -- among them Sharon Stone, William H. Macy, Christian Slater, Harry Belafonte, Anthony Hopkins, Demi Moore, Freddy Rodriguez, Helen Hunt, Heather Graham and Sheen -- worked for scale.
Members of Robert Kennedy's family have declined to watch the film, but they have endorsed it, Estevez said, because "they believe a new generation will hear Bobby Kennedy's words all over again ... and at a time when we need them perhaps more than ever."
The film is meant as a call to action, Estevez said, "not only to voters, but to politicians who have to find the conviction to speak from their hearts."