Bobby

This combination time capsule/docudrama is sometimes poignant but not always pertinent. As a multicharacter take on the scene at L.A.’s Ambassador Hotel in the hours leading up to the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968, it has the promise of a big cast playing out assorted quotidian anecdotes, but few dramatic pay-offs apart from the obvious. Emilio Estevez’s third feature as writer-director has ambition and portent to spare, and yet too much of it comes across merely as a meandering slice of California life circa 1968. Video and audio excerpts of RFK’s campaign speeches give the film some eloquent political substance, past and present, but much of that comes only at the end. The inevitable assassination scene is done with a tasteful sort of you-are-there realism. The subplots—a romantic triangle among hotel employees, squabbling among the kitchen workers, a farcical drug deal, several beleaguered married couples—confer a welter of emotions on the film’s climax, and more than a few seem mere distractions. The best peformances turn up in what are perhaps the best-written parts: Sharon Stone as a disillusioned upscale beautician, Laurence Fishburne as the lordly hotel chef and Christian Slater as bigoted assistant manager.