These inspiring words had an enormous impact on Robert F. Kennedy and thus on us all. The film "Bobby" now showing in theatres everywhere follows the lives of a handful of people who have nothing in common, except that they're staying in or working at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the day of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968. Why such a structurally scattered movie should hang together at all is a mystery. That it does more than that, that it works brilliantly, is a miracle, or at the very least the product of unquantifiable causes: a pervasive mood, a unified intensity of feeling, a filmmaker's unspoken but undeniable understanding of the meaning of every moment. Emilio Estevez wrote and directed the film, which is astonishing in itself. Talk about second acts in American life. With one film, Estevez has transformed himself from a middle-aged joke into a youthful auteur who has made something beautiful, something he can be proud of, one of the best films of 2006. Perhaps strong emotion guided him. Otherwise, it's difficult to imagine how he could have known that a narrative so diffuse could come together into a powerful whole.
(Excerpts from a review by Mick LaSalle)
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