nuts4chic - film review
|
|
|||||||||||||||
by Vera Brozzoni 1968, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles: from the kitchen to the guest rooms to the offices, the hotel is thrown into turmoil at the imminent arrival of Bobby Kennedy. The same Bobby Kennedy who is running for president and is going to give an electioneering speech. The candidate’s supporting committee is working feverishly in the background of this collective historical fresco, while in the foreground the small private incidents of a variegated crowd are entwined with their dreams.
Bobby is the first film helmed by actor Emilio Estevez after The War At Home, 1996; a rich rank of Hollywood stars, from Harry Belafonte to Anthony Hopkins to Helen Hunt, agreed to act in the film. Estevez himself in an important role, as well as his real life father Martin Sheen. Since it was released, many have drawn comparisons between this film and Robert Altman’s oeuvre: Estevez was certainly inspired by him when he constructed his multi-voiced, multi-layered script, yet he’s not just aping the Old Master. Although he hasn’t enough personality and experience to direct a masterwork (a rumour in Venice Film Festival having the film as the winner of the Official Competition was immediately stifled), his skills are good enough to make an undeniably tense and engaging film that strongly believes in its own message – even to the point of going too far - like with Mark Isham’s score is unbearably pompous and reduces the emotional charge of the action instead of enhancing it. As for the rest of the aesthetic package, it is perfectly calibrated. Curiously, the two highlights of the film revolve around the two extremes of the social ladder: the first is the amazing duet between luxury hairdresser Sharon Stone (unusually anti-glamorous) and aging ex-diva Demi Moore, who share a very intense scene in which stardom, real life and fictional character blend together. The other takes place in the kitchen of the hotel, as chef Laurence Fishburne gives an inspiring life lesson to young worker Freddy Rodriguez. Ashton Kutcher, forcibly inserted in the film thanks to his wife Demi Moore’s pressure, is the only jarring note in the otherwise flawless cast: where even Elijah Wood and Lindsay Lohan succeed in polishing three-dimensional characters, Kutcher’s wannabe guru role stays sketchy and rough.
The secret of a film like Bobby is its sincerity and honesty: the director knows that Kennedy’s words raised issues that are still highly topical, and wants those words to be heard again. In every scene, we can actually feel the commitment of the whole crew who made this film, trying to remind us that the day Bobby was shot, history was at a turning point. All the dreams of a generation of Americans gather in the Ambassador Hotel, and the shattering of their dreams is also the beginning of the end for a country that from that moment on, will slide down the spiral of violence, inequality and persecution complex. The historical clout of Bobby Kennedy’s words is evident in the voice-over speech we hear at the end: although a rhetoric and heavy-handed device, for a moment it conjures up the vision of a different world, of the gold dust America was holding in its big hands.
1 of 1 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Home | Gossip | Fashion | Health | Destiny | Relationships | Travel | Career | Beauty | Green Issues | Culture | Family | Lifestyle | New Mother |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Those same dreams Bobby might be able to make real. But immediately after giving the speech that seemed to have wrapped up his victory, almost a moral testament, he is shot dead in the kitchen of the hotel. 
