A Terrific Idea Run Aground and Wasted

One of the key selling points to any film, obviously, is its premise.  Sure, some can be boiled down to a "(Movie star) in a (genre) with (movie star)" formula, and that gets films made, and in a lot of cases makes money and puts Hummers and Lamborghinis in California garages.  But other times, you've got to draw folks in on concept.  And so, when I heard that a film about the Ambassador Hotel and its inhabitants on the day Robert Kennedy was shot was going before the cameras, I was instantly sold.  It's the kind of film I expected to already exist, so great an idea it seemed, so I was excited.

And the cast!  Wow, this movie has all the acting and the movie stars you could want in a big period piece!  Academy Award winners and nominees galore!  Anthony Hopkins!  William H. Macy!  Sharon Stone!  Laurence Fishburne!  Helen Hunt!  Box office titans!  Elijah Wood!  Demi Moore!  Shia LeBeouf!  Plus great eye candy for men and women alike!  Lindsey Lohan!  Heather Graham!  Ashton Kutcher!  Er, Harry Belafonte!  Plus, TV stars!  Martin Sheen!  Freddy Rodriguez!  David Krumholtz!  Joshua Jackson!  Nick Cannon!  Wowwee!

How could this film go wrong?  Well I'll tell ya, it does, but not spectacularly so.  First off, it was the pet project of Emilio Estevez, who apparently was able to round up this unbelievable cast with a script he wrote and then wrangled up the funding to direct.  This was unwise to say the least.  Estevez, while a decent actor, is no director, and only a slightly better writer.

Secondly, with a cast this massive, you demand screen time and depth of character for all, so the film has to be over two hours, right?  You'd like more a strong, Robert Altman-esque 165 minutes or so, no?  Nope, Estevez got this whole thing in at 112 minutes.  So not only is everyone on screen cheated by getting about eight minutes a piece, but the film still manages to feel long.  Amazing, I know.

Thirdly, it's horribly preachy and heavy-handed.  Yes, everyone loves RFK, and he said a lot of interesting, thought provoking things, and he was inspirational, and his death was tragic, but this movie uses Kennedy as a device that only drives the many plots along, and uses his speeches as voice over to punctuate...the fact that it's the day he dies.  And that's about it. 

To try and explain the plot would be pointless, as it is basically a dozen minor, mostly uninteresting stories of people at the hotel and what they are doing or feeling the day of the California Presidential primary.  Some of it does connect to Kennedy's campaign, victory, and imminent arrival.  Some of them don't at all.  Some aren't bad.  Some are. 

The best are the clearest in the motive to have them included in the film.  Differences in race and age explain the cast that spans the spectrum of color and longevity, and the stories directly dealing with this seem to fare best.  Two RFK campaign kids (LeBeouf and Brian Geraghty) taking acid and tripping out feels period, and provides some relief from all the heady blathering going on.  Jose (Rodriguez) listening to Don Drysdale's record setting game with the Dodgers, and his ordeal with not getting out of work to go in person, is very touching, and clearly illustrates the struggles going on upstairs and downstairs in this hotel.  The doorman John Casey (Hopkins) waxing philosophical about history and aging and what life's all about has a certain resonance that the rest of the film can't quite achieve (probably due to Hopkins being the one intoning these sentiments more than anything).

But the vast majority of these characters are wasted in one-dimensional, nothing roles and scenes that add little more than time to the film.  It jerks to a halt at every focus change and never gets moving until RFK shows up.  Even then, it's just a series of edits while you wait for Sirhan to arrive, for RFK to finish his speech, and for everyone to head to the kitchen.

The ending is at least emotional, fittingly, but does get a bit pulled apart by everything that's going on.  The filmmaker's decision to have a half dozen of the characters we've seen during the film get shot in the kitchen is really off putting, as it tends to lessen what else is happening.  With RFK shot, and receiving all the medical attention, you feel bad for everyone else, who is getting ignored.  Is this how you should feel?  Angry that they are tending to Kennedy during this national tragedy?  It's a bizarre position to put the audience in.

Also, while I understand these are fictional characters in a real life event, or at best composites, I would think they'd try to stick to history a little bit at least with the end.  I didn't know and wouldn't have known that no one else shot in the kitchen died except for Kennedy if they didn't tell us this in scroll before the end credits.  And yet, watching the ending of the film, there's at least one other character who is very, very dead from a bullet wound.  Why include this and the scroll?  That's just destroying any little bit of suspension of disbelief the audience has created.

With a surer-handed director, some of this could've been worked out. The script possibly could've gone in for some expanding and rewrites, and a truly great film could have been crafted.  It's a premise that would lend itself to a big Hollywood epic designed to make you cry and think about our nation and the price of change.  As it is, this is a sloppy, hard to watch, hard to sympathize with film that only works in spurts, and not frequently enough. 

The Goatius Grade = 2.5