Emilio Estevez
Bobby

"There are those who look at the way things are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not." Robert Francis Kennedy

The year 1968 went down in history as one of the most turbulent, marked by strong political contrasts, racial clashes, and revolts. Most significantly, it profoundly marked the American social reality with its tragic events. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and later of Robert Kennedy brought pacifists' hopes, not just in America, into direct contact with the true face of contemporary reality, a face not inclined to peace talks and decidedly more devoted to economic calculations and strategies of a different kind.

Almost forty years later, the memory of those days is still alive in the political soul of the USA and also the rest of the world. This was well demonstrated by the success, both critically and publicly, of "Bobby" by Emilio Estevez. The film is dedicated to Senator Kennedy's California primary elections, essential for the presidential race, but especially to their tragic epilogue at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5. The great strength of the film, and if you like, a bit of its limitation, is that it does not have a documentary cut but succeeds in telling stories within the story. There are 22 characters in "Bobby," and none of them is the protagonist. It's a sort of modern "verism" where the figures populating this hotel are left alone and looked at with an eye, though never entirely uncritical, by Estevez, who often lets the democratic spirit and a philosophy of hope and peace shine through, fully representing Kennedy's political soul. Robert Kennedy's figure is not that of an angel; his family had many skeletons in the closet, but the director decides that it is the senator himself who tells his story using archival material, speeches, and the sentiments of the American people to try to provide as faithful an image of the time as possible, of a man trying to save a country full of contradictions, immersed in a conflict without an exit. Those words of his, "They made a desert and called it peace," referring to Vietnam, sound terribly current.

Shot with a good pace, the film is very well handled in its plurality. Estevez tells many stories: that of the old doorman (Anthony Hopkins), the unfaithful manager (William H. Macy), his wife (Sharon Stone), the hotel's celebrity hairdresser, a fading alcoholic singer (Demi Moore), the many waiters and kitchen staff immigrated from various countries, and many others. All of them will see their dreams of a fairer world disappear in the hotel kitchens when a Mexican immigrant ends Robert Kennedy's life.

A dramatic, melancholic film, an indictment of the current American administration, but also a touching portrait of a political generation that remained unfinished, of a complex and articulated historical period that left so much behind that ultimately everything that followed seems superfluous.