Bobby

Bobby is a drama focusing on the events at the Ambassador Hotel, the day Robert F Kennedy was shot there in 1968 (also the day of the '68 presidential elections). Including such stars as Martin Sheen, Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan, Ashton Kutcher, Helen Hunt, Sharon Stone, Elijah Wood and William H Macy - gasp for breath - it does at times become distracting, but this is balanced by the fact that almost all performances are strong and engaging. Instead of hiring an actor to play the eponymous RFK himself, old footage is used and worked through the drama convincingly, especially towards the grippingly tragic climax. So, if the story doesn't centre around Robert, what does it centre on?

Well, the clients and staff at the hotel. It doesn't divide anyone into pro-Kennedy or anti-Kennedy groups - although the RFK canvassers are a safe bet for the former - instead attempting to bring forward a fractured picture of America as it was at the time. Particularly interesting were the stories of the hotel beautician (Sharon Stone) and her unfaithful husband, the manager (an always-credible Macy); the young Mexican waiter (Freddy Rodriguez, who, while notionally too old for the part at twenty-eight, was otherwise perfectly cast) struggling with inequality; and Wade and Dwayne (Joshua Jackson and Nick Cannon respectively), the younger Kennedy supporters, in awe of the great man's human touch.

However, the expanse of interwoven threads does have its weaknesses, such as the tale of Diane - played by an earnest Lindsay Lohan - a young woman who's planning to marry her former classmate (Elijah Wood) to save him from a draft to Vietnam. While it's given a promising start, it's soon allowed to descend into a disappointing cliché, and neither of the actors really inhabit the time or role. The adjacent story of two Kennedy campaigners, Cooper (Shia LeBeouf) and Jimmy (Brian Geraghty), who decide to take election day off to drop acid with down-and-out hippie Fisher (an almost believable Kutcher), relies largely on cheap laughs, but is rescued by LeBeouf and Geraghty's straight-faced performances and realistic relationships - in particular with the lovely Susan Taylor, played by a sweet, convincing Mary-Elizabeth Winstead.

By neglecting to include the assassin in its overly-long list of characters, the purpose of Bobby becomes clear. It is not intended as an unbiased look at the past, nor as a lesson for today's society (what can we learn from a nameless, faceless killer?); rather, as an exercise in nostalgia, where a man who died too young for the public to have real cause to doubt him can be viewed in rosy colours. Indeed, Robert F Kennedy could have been the leader America needed, but there is nothing to be gained from that line of thought - Bobby shows us a loss, certainly, and perhaps one of great sorrow, but we shall never know quite how deep that sorrow is. And by making the man a hero before he ever had a chance to prove just what he was, we lose perspective.

For all the nostalgia, however, the film is immensely enjoyable. Though the dialogue is sometimes embarrassingly clichéd (Lawrence Fishburne's speech about "the once and future king" is woefully out-of-character and obviously scripted), the cinematography is, for the most part, beautiful. It doesn't quite achieve the same 1960s look and feel as other modern films set then (such as the superior, but entirely different Catch Me If You Can), and it does suffer slightly from the lack of it, but the pacing is excellent and those without particular interest in the decade may not notice. Flawed, but worth seeing, Bobby at least did what it set out to do - bring RFK's tragic assassination, and all the associated grief, to a new audience, in a new way.