Memo to David Denby: A.O. Scott gets it
from his review of Bobby in the New York Times,
. . . Nonetheless the ambition behind “Bobby” is large and serious. Along with many other Americans who grew up in the wake of the 1960s — for whom figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were always more myth than flesh and blood — Mr. Estevez, who was 6 years old when Kennedy was shot, seems preoccupied with understanding what it was like to live through some of that decade’s galvanizing events.
The pulse of history is most audible not in the fictional portions of the movie, but in the moments, especially at the end, when the documentary record takes over. The sound of Kennedy’s voice, even as it takes you out of the movie, throws you into a past that seems both terribly remote and uncannily alive. When you hear his patient, meditative speeches, from which every note of demagoguery or pandering has been purged, you glimpse the film Mr. Estevez set out to make — the one you may wish you were watching.
