Bobby

With a cast of more stars than you can shake a ticker tape at, Bobby panoramas 24 hours in the life of the Ambassador Hotel before Senator (and presidential hopeful) Robert Kennedy arrives and is assassinated.

The year is 1968 and in many ways this movie is a snapshot of the era. Anti-war protests over the war in Vietnam, Martin Luther King shot, bras being burnt and people tuning in and dropping out with psychedelic drugs. The film takes the lives, hopes and wishes of a cross section of people and presents them as a microcosm of the mood of a nation.

Bobby Kennedy, like brother Jack before him, was a charismatic speaker, although relying more on his passion for human rights than clever turns of phrase. The Senator, riding high in the California primaries, is played mostly by himself from archive footage. Instead of using trick photography to place the actors next to him, the film simply cuts back and forth to the live action, or occasionally a stand-in will show the back of Bobby's head.

Misleadingly from the title, the movie is about the aspirations of a generation, some of which are symbolised by the figure of Kennedy. The story takes a rambling non-linear soap opera approach, rather like Magnolia, and most of the characters are linked only at the end.

There is the young lad (Elijah Wood) being drafted and a girl (Lindsay Lohan) is marrying him so he will be posted to Germany rather than the body bag factory of 'Nam. There is the cuckolded wife and beauty salon manager (Sharon Stone), sharing repressed emotion with a drunken cabaret performer (Demi Moore). Two young members of the campaign staff take time out to experience their first LSD trip. The restaurant staff, mostly illegal immigrants, is forced to take double shifts. Everyone we meet is buoyed along by hope as represented in the Senator's anti-war, anti-discrimination rallying speeches.

This is a leisurely, detailed and lovingly crafted film. To those who lived through, or can empathise with the period, it will have great sentimental value. To those who see a similarity between opposition to the Vietnam War and opposition to the Iraq War some 40 years later, it provides a useful historical reference point.

Both wars are against a vaguely defined enemy. Both are proving to be wars that America cannot “win”. Yet for all its emotion, the lionising of Bobby Kennedy is based on promises more than any evidence that he would have been able to stop the war sooner. His brother, JFK, was largely responsible for initiating it, in spite of his permanent halo - alternatively, he was a puppet of the CIA, which RFK might have had to succumb to as well. Both, like George W Bush, were deeply religious, and no doubt the oratory and rhetoric of the biblical traditions helped them to inspire millions, with or without supporting facts.

Writer/director Emilio Estevez questions nothing, merely records a fragment in time. But in shoring up the popular mythology surrounding the Kennedys, he pays homage to the modern cult of the emotional sound bite, which continues to be the bulwark determining how the United States elects its presidents.

Bobby is a beautifully made film, but this will not prevent less patient audiences asking, “What was the point?”