I admit a bias when it comes to the 1960s. It's a time I wish I had been able to experience. The music, the films, the literature, the art, and the very real belief that an individual could make a difference; I don't try to hide that I tend to get sweeped up and carried away by my romanticized notions of my father's era. Bobby plays to this nostalgic sensibility, though more in content than in form. Unlike Factory Girl, which was released the same year and concerns roughly the same time period, Estevez's film doesn't try to disguise itself as a product of the times it illustrates. Save for one scene which attempts to visualize an acid trip (which is, coincidentally, the film's worst segment, featuring Ashton Kutcher giving the film's worst performance) there are no true-to-the-period behind-the-camera histrionics. Instead, Estevez rips a few pages from the books of Robert Altman and Grand Hotel in an effort to define an era through a series of portraits all relating tangentially to Robert Kennedy's assassination.
In fact, the film's closest relative is the unjustly overlooked and shortlived TV series "American Dreams," the first episode of which concluded poignantly with the other Kennedy assassination five years earlier. Like that show, Bobby presents us with an array of characters, each representing a different aspect of the 60s, ranging from the draft to the civil and women's rights movements. Unfortunately for Estevez, he doesn't have three seasons to develop these characters; instead, he has two hours, and as such, few of the characters become more than archetypes.
What carries the film up to its powerful final third is the discord between the intangible sense of hope which lingers above all of the characters and the heartbreaking conclusion which the audience knows is inevitable. Bobby is clear in its intention to be about the murder of Kennedy rather than about Kennedy, but there are long stretches when the film seems to exist just outside of the events at its core, and it isn't until halfway through when the results of the primaries start coming in and Kennedy himself starts to become a more concrete element in the film that it really picks up steam and pulls you along with it.
This isn't to say Bobby is a bad film. It's handsomely executed in nearly every way, and it's obvious that Estevez has a great fondness for his subject. But that fondness is one befitting someone who was only a child when Kennedy was assassinated, and consequently, the film is more about the ideas and the feelings than about the people and the events. In spite of that -- or maybe even because of it -- the film's last 15 minutes are a knockout. Depicting the murder itself, and set to Kennedy's own words, the film's conclusion is an emotionally resonant, affecting reminder of a time when the American people believed they had something worth fighting for, and that their efforts would not go unnoticed. The film is a loving memorial not only to one man, but the very idea of One Man, when a person's individuality and his solidarity could exist in harmony for the betterment of a nation. Politics may have always been dirty, but there's no harm in viewing the past with a little less cynicism than we view the present.