Bobby

For progressives lifted, however temporarily, by the swell of a turning tide, Bobby can be seen clearly for what it is—an Airport movie with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy as the central calamity and an all-star cast deployed like multiple George Kennedys. Juggling some 22 main characters on June 4, 1968, in the hours leading up to RFK's speech at the Ambassador Hotel and its tragic aftermath, ambitious actor-writer-director Emilio Estevez means to eulogize the hopes of a nation, showing the night's impact on a group of hotel guests and staff cross- sectioned by age, race, and class. But his movie ends up buried under its stifling good intentions and dire execution.

It falls to gentlemanly retired doorman Anthony Hopkins to acknowledge Bobby's model, the prototypical subplot-a-palooza Grand Hotel. Meanwhile, the kitchen staff (divided between African Americans and Latinos) is more concerned with Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale's shutout streak than the Kennedy rally that evening. The young firebrands resent the hotel's white power structure, represented by nice-guy boss William H. Macy and thin-lipped racist Christian Slater; a contentious staff meeting prompts even-keeled chef Laurence Fishburne to deliver life-lesson homilies in the indigestible metaphorical terms of his cobbler recipe.

Estevez practically builds the Ambassador a new wing to accommodate his upstairs-downstairs subplots—finding vacancies for a self-sacrificing war bride (Lindsay Lohan!), a boozy nightclub singer (Demi Moore!), and even his dad Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt as bourgeois second honeymooners. Other actors barge in like nosy neighbors borrowing cups of sugar. At the door—who could that soldier be? Why, hello, Elijah Wood!

Estevez's on-the-nose direction boldfaces contemporary parallels that might have been alarming and illuminating, if they hadn't been superimposed so blatantly on the material. How blatantly? Try the voter registration coordinator who explains the ballots, carefully pointing out "what the folks down at IBM like to call 'chads.'" Or the spelled-out references to an unpopular current war. Or the tensions concerning the political ramifications of illegal immigrants. It may be, given Hollywood's timidity about anything political, that the only way Estevez could get a movie made about the state of the union in 2006 was to set it in 1968, but he flattens his noble intent with a sledgehammer.

As awful as Bobby is, there's never a moment its maker doesn't brave the derision of cynics, and in a few scenes—for example, the well-played exchanges between Joshua Jackson's comradely campaign coordinator and Nick Cannon's true-believer volunteer—it evokes the hope that many Americans feel briefly rekindled and even more quickly doused every four years. As for the assassination, Estevez treats it as the snuffing of an entire alternate future—an America untangled from Vietnam, untainted by Watergate, and untroubled by racial friction.

The movie regards the candidate (who's fully visible only in news clips) from a mythic distance. But doing so robs the actual Robert F. Kennedy of his complexity. We'll never find out whether he would have become another Lincoln. Nor will he disappoint us with a long, sad decline into political careerism. JIM RIDLEY