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November 19, 2006
I'll take a pass on Bobby
I've been hearing that the new film, Bobby, is sure to garner a host of Oscar nominations; the flick got a standing ovation at a screening at Cannes, which means something, I'm sure.
The film is about the people who were standing around the night presidential candidate (and presumed nominee) Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
John Podhoretz has a few observations on the film's failure to see the trees for the forest -- a weird take on the event guaranteed to keep folks like me from wasting our shekels on tickets.
Writer-director Emilio Estevez made a mystifying dramatic choice: To tell a story about the RFK assassination that's not about the RFK assassination, but rather about a bunch of extremely dull people who happened to be in the vicinity.
[...]
Kennedy is shown only in contemporary film clips (on two occasions, we are shown the back of Kennedy's head). There's a great deal of talk about how he is certain to be the next president of the United States, and about the great hope he has given to the poor and the meek and the struggling and the black and the white and the brown.
But what's interesting is that the clips we're shown, which are intended to display RFK as a secular saint, reveal only that he was exactly the same sort of politician we just saw in the hundreds across the country during the recent election season.
He's shown talking to children in awkward terms about the environment, using the "despair" of Americans in the industrial belt as a backdrop for a picturesque campaign appearance, expressing sorrow over the racial divide, and criticizing an unpopular war.
The only surprising element is that, speaking extemporaneously, it appears his grammar was poor enough to make George W. Bush seem like Strunk, or maybe even White.
Thus, if you don't come to the theater already disposed to believe Bobby Kennedy was destined to convert this troubled country into a utopia of egalitarian brotherhood, you may find it difficult to understand the reverential sentimentality with which the movie's characters discuss RFK.
Or why so many liberals have felt for the past 38 years that the killing of Robert F. Kennedy was the hinge moment in history that set America on the course to an evil conservative future.
It's not just the bad grammar that's Bush-like; every word out of Kennedy's mouth sounds like nothing so much as "compassionate conservatism."
[...]
The movie ends with a scene of the carnage in the kitchen of the Ambassador where Kennedy was shot, along with those five bystanders. (None of the characters shot in the movie is based on a real-life victim.) The only sound we hear is a gorgeously eloquent Kennedy speech bemoaning the violence in America and how terrible it is that we commit violence against each other. Kennedy, the movie is saying, was such a prophet that he prophesied his own death.
Only that's not the story of his death. Kennedy was not killed in a random act of American-on-American violence. Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian, and the assassination was an overtly political act -- Sirhan's own contemporaneous diary entries demonstrate he wanted Kennedy dead because he thought RFK was too friendly to Israel. The Kennedy assassination was the first act of Arab terrorism on American soil.
I find it fascinating that the martyred heroes of their political party, the Brothers Kennedy, have more in common with Pres. Bush than they do with the current leadership of the Dems. Whether its Bobby's garbled syntax or JFK's muscular foreign policy, it's hard to imagine either being easily distinguishable from the current occupant of the White House.
Although JFK did seem much more comfortable in his own skin, perhaps a result of the ministrations of his personal physician.
Perhaps the most telling part of Podhoretz's review is in the final paragraph. Americans of all political parties have long forgotten that an Arab killed the presidential frontrunner because he was too closely aligned with the Jews, too pro-Israel.
The aftermath of the Kennedy assassination ver. 1.2 was the Gun Control Act of 1968 and the quick disappearance of his Arab assassin down the memory hole. Why do I suspect Bobby Kennedy's not the last American pol to end up in the sights of a Middle-Eastern killer, and that the aftermath the next time 'round will be more ... dramatic?
Hollywood will be hard pressed to miss the terror angle again, but I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make it about the victim(s) and not the killer: Why do they hate us so? Why do they hate U.S. so?
Posted by Mike Lief at November 19, 2006 04:06 PM
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Comments
Back then, the Brothers K did have similar political leanings to todays Republican party, and indeed they have nothing in common with todays Democratic Party. Yet had they lived, I've often wondered if they'd have become as radically liberal as their surviving sibling, Ted.
Posted by: Sonarman at November 19, 2006 05:30 PM