Bobby
Anthony Hopkins, William H. Macy, Heather Graham

Bobby, you have chance to be a prophet, but prophets get shot. - Hosea Williams.
There must be a revolution. Not a revolution in the streets, but in the minds and hearts and souls of our people. – Bobby Kennedy

It is a bad game to play because the dice are always loaded against you. What if? What if Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy had not been assassinated on June 6, 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan? What if he would have been elected President? Thousands of young men who died in Vietnam would still be walking around. There never would have been a Watergate, the shame of watching a Commander-and-Chief resign. No Reagan Revolution. We might have seen the better angels of our nature.
Most young people have no clue who Bobby was, what he represented in the minds of so many. The broad strokes are easy. He was the seventh child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, the runt of the litter. After law school, he worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the McCarthy Hearings (finding Communists in our government) and then moved onto the Senate hearings on Labor Racketeering (organized crime in labor). It was the election of his older brother, John, to the Presidency, that thrust him into the national spotlight. Although unthinkable today, John selected him to be Attorney General. Yet, he became more. The President turned towards his brother for help and advice during the Bay of Pigs, an ill-fated U.S.-supported invasion of Cuba, during which his brother realized that much of the advice he was getting from the military and others in his administration was faulty. Unlike Presidents today who will not admit when they make a mistake, Kennedy publicly accepted responsibility and, when America was as close to nuclear annihilation as we have ever been, the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was Bobby’s voice and efforts that helped lead us to safety. After John was killed in Dallas, Bobby became the Senator from New York, defeating incumbent Kenneth Keating in 1964.  Coming to the conclusion that the Vietnam War was a lost cause, Bobby became the most powerful politician to come out against the war.  This break with the administration led him to run against the sitting President from his own party.  On the ropes, Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the race. Momentum appeared to be sweeping the former Attorney General into his brother’s office and just like that he was gone.

Most of his life Robert Kennedy was known as an arrogant, ill-tempered child of privilege. He was his brother’s defender, the attack dog set loose with no time for social graces. Yet, something happened when John was killed. Something inside of him changed. He reached out to those in pain, to touch them. Although it is hard to imagine a politician today going where Bobby did, he went into the poorest slums, sat in abandoned school buses with migrant workers, journeyed up into the hills of Appalachia where some of the poorest of the poor still remain hidden today, talked with Cesar Chavez, spoke for those who had no voice. He gave people who had no hope a little hope. They mobbed him. Just like that, it was over, in a pool of blood with a busboy holding a towel to his head in the kitchen of some hotel.
The movie Bobby is a Robert Altman-like attempt to weave a number of stories of common people around the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles that fateful day in June of 1964. There is Jose (Freddy Rodriguez), a kitchen worker who would rather be attending a Dodgers game than working a double shift, a chief named Edward Robinson (Laurence Fishburne), a hotel receptionist named Angela (Heather Graham) who is having an affair with the manager, Paul (William H. Macy). The cast includes the likes of Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Elijah Wood, Anthony Hopkins, Harry Belafonte, Helen Hunt, Emilio Estevez (also the director), Martin Sheen, Ashton Kutcher, Shia LaBeouf, Lindsay Lohan, Christian Slater, and Mark Valley as Bobby.
It is a mixed bag of a film. This kind of film has been done countless times before with better results such as Crash and Magnola. There are moments that it is outstanding and moments it falls flat. I would give it a grade of a B/B-. Maybe I am being too hard on this film because of my admiration for Bobby Kennedy. While it is questionable that he would have taken the Democratic Convention and gotten the nomination due to Lyndon Johnson’s hatred for him. Still, in an era of Bush, wouldn’t you love to hear a politician speak the truth with these words, "Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product ... if we should judge America by that - counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs that glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."

Verdict: What If?