Senator Robert F. Kennedy meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Bobby is not so much a movie about the man or about his assassination, but rather about his influence on the American people. Writer and director (and former 80s "brat pack" member) Emilio Estevez shows a great amount of maturity in how he handles a very tricky story. Whereas many filmmakers would have probably made your standard biopic about the man's life and his death, Estevez instead decides to take a much more ambitious approach by juggling multiple storylines of people who play some part in what the man stood for back in 1968. He has rounded up an impressive all-star cast to tell his story, and although the movie threatens to become top heavy from time to time, Bobby never completely collapses under the massive story it tries to tell thanks to some very talented performances on the screen.

The entire film is set during one fateful day and place - June 6th, 1968 in L.A.'s Ambassador Hotel. It was on the evening of that day that Robert Kennedy would be killed by an assassin's bullet as he made his way out of the Hotel after giving a speech. Before that tragic moment, it was just another day for a nation trapped in an unpopular war, and the film follows a large group of people (both employees of the hotel and guests), who will all be involved somehow with the turning point that will occur that night. Our large cast of characters includes the manager of the Hotel (William H. Macy), who is having an affair with a switchboard operator (Heather Graham) behind the back of his wife Miriam (Sharon Stone), who works as a beautician in the building. There's the retired doorman (Anthony Hopkins) who has been with the Hotel since the beginning, and can't quite let go of the past, and usually spends his days in the lobby playing chess with some of the regular guests and employees. There's also the racist kitchen boss (Christian Slater) who is trying to cling onto what little respect he has after just recently being informed he's been fired. His kitchen staff is made up of mostly minority workers, including a young Mexican-American worker named Jose (Freddy Rodriguez), and a kindly black chef (Laurence Fishburne) who doesn't like to cause trouble for anyone.

The cast continues to grow when we are introduced to a washed-up alcoholic entertainer named Virginia Fallon (Demi Moore) who is giving her final performance at the Hotel's auditorium, and whose husband (Emilio Estevez) is starting to have second thoughts about their relationship. There's a young bride-to-be named Diane (Lindsey Lohan) who is planning to marry fellow college student William (Elijah Wood) in a desperate attempt to keep him from having to fight in Vietnam. There's a middle aged couple (Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt) who are celebrating their anniversary. And because of Kennedy's upcoming speech that evening, there are a number of PR aides trying to drum up support for the candidates, including the experienced aides Wade and Dwayne (Joshua Jackson and Nick Carter), and new recruits Cooper and Jimmy (Brian Geraghty and Shia LaBeouf), who spend most of the day running around the Hotel in a LSD-fueled haze after they unwisely make a trip to a hotel room where a drug dealer (Ashton Kutcher) resides. Last, but not least, there's a sweet young waitress in the hotel restaurant who dreams of bigger things (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), and a Czech reporter named Lenka Janacek (Svetlana Metkina) who is fighting to get an interview with Robert Kennedy, even though the aides keep on turning her down, brushing her off as a Communist. All of these people will either be influenced by the words of Kennedy that evening, or be involved in some way in the chaos that occurs that evening.

With so many characters and storylines vying for our attention, Bobby sometimes seems to be biting off a bit more than it can chew. Though never confusing as it leaps back and forth throughout its multiple storylines, and expertly edited so that the storytelling never becomes muddled, you still get the sense that Estevez could have trimmed his cast by at least half, and come up with a movie that is just as good if not even better. A large part of this has to do with the fact that only half of the characters are developed to any degree of satisfaction. The rest are either short cameos that exist simply so that one more celebrity could be squeezed into the cast (like Ashton Kutcher's drug dealer character), or they are simply not developed enough for us to truly care about them, like Martin Sheen and Helen Hunt as the married couple having a getaway together at the hotel. The whole storyline of the young PR aides who go on a day-long drug trip could have also been removed, as they simply exist for easy comic relief, and don't really seem to play any real purpose to the story until the final few moments, where their characters take a turn. The characters who are developed strongly are great as they are, but if the movie had just removed some of the more unnecessary characters, it could have spent more time on the interesting characters, and have made the ones that work even more interesting. Perhaps writer-director Estevez was attached too much to his work the way it was, and didn't want to drop anything he had written. An outside director who could look at the script in a different way probably could have easily fixed this problem.

Even with its overloaded storytelling and cast, Bobby still works. The reason is because what does work in the film works so amazingly well. The storylines that do work include the Hotel manager and his affair, the young couple who are getting married, the fragile and broken relationship between faded celebrity Virginia Fallon and her husband, and PR aide Dwayne and his personal experience with Kennedy himself, and what Kennedy's message means to him. The reason why these stories work is because the screenplay is able to dig deep into these characters, and expose not just their personalities to the screen, but also how they fit into different aspects of American society at the time. The nation was going through tremendous changes at the time, with the Vietnam war dividing people and race issues literally exploding onto the streets in acts of violence and protest. It is when the film is giving a human face to these issues, and truly developing characters that we can care for, that Bobby is at its best. It is during these moments that Estevez shows a sure hand, both in his storytelling and in directing. He wisely does not drum up the melodrama, and is able to make his characters into real, flawed three dimensional characters. It is also during these moments that you see the movie that Bobby could have been if it were just a little bit more focused. For all it's flaws, these moments make the movie worth watching, and show that Estevez has definitely matured past his old image in the 80s and early 90s.

Although the film may be somewhat uneven, the large cast that has been assembled literally could not be better. There are three big surprises in the cast, and they come in the form of Lindsey Lohan, Sharon Stone and Nick Cannon. Lohan is given perhaps her best role in years as a young bride who begins to question her decisions to marry, even though she knows what she's doing is right. If she can avoid brain dead junk like Just My Luck and pursue more intelligent work like this, she may still have a chance to live up to the potential she showed when she literally burst onto the scene a couple years ago. Sharon Stone gives an equally career-changing performance as the wife of the hotel manager who is faced with a very difficult situation when she finds out about his unfaithful ways. She is vulnerable and completely sympathetic and honest in every bit of her portrayal, and seeing her in this movie almost makes you forget about her laughably bad villain turn in Catwoman, or the overly vampish and stupid Basic Instinct 2. Nick Cannon, however, will completely shock anyone who knows him from his previous work. After appearing in brainless teen garbage like Underclassman and Love Don't Cost a Thing, he is finally given a role that truly shows off his acting ability, and he gives one of the best performances of the film as a PR aide who has a lot of personal interest in Kennedy's ideals and vision for the country. The rest of the cast is excellent all around, with long-standing veterans like Anthony Hopkins and William H. Macy giving fine performances, and Demi Moore and Estevez playing off of each other very well as a husband and wife whose relationship is threatened by the wife's alcohol problem. Each actor in the cast gets their own individual moment to stand out in some way, and are often good enough to make you temporarily forget about the film's problems.

There really is a lot to admire in Bobby, and I greatly admire what Estevez was trying to do. It's a great idea to explain the impact Kennedy had on the nation by showing it through the nation's viewpoints in the form of these different characters. With a little bit more tightening of the script, Bobby could have been one of the great films of the year. For what it is, it will have to settle for a very good movie that simply tries to cover too much in a short amount of time. Maybe this idea would have worked better as a made for TV mini series, so that the large cast of characters would not be restricted to a mere two hour running time. Regardless of its faults, Bobby is an ambitious portrait of a certain period in American history, and one where the positives are most likely to stay with you longer than the negatives.

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