Toronto Dispatch. 6.

Out of the many messages in the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival, there was the limp assurance that, even if you can't protect (or elect) leaders like Robert F Kennedy or John Lennon, at least you can mourn them on the screen.

If you're tempted to think that Robert F Kennedy was not a special politician, just try to name another politician these days who is known by his or her first name. Hillary? That says it all. She's risen through hard work and icy calculation. Charisma is not the word that comes to mind.

RFK had charisma, and unlike his brother Jack, he seemed to have developed a sense of integrity along the way. It took him a while to get to that point, having served as a hatchet man for Senator Joseph McCarthy (at the bidding of his father, the monstrous power broker Joseph P Kennedy), as a vindictive anti-union investigator, and as sergeant at arms for his president brother. After John Kennedy's death, RFK became a senator from New York State, even though, like Hillary, he probably didn't even have a driver's license from the state that he wanted to represent.

By 1968, RFK had become the "Bobby" that Emilio Estevez admires in his worshipful film. (I use worshipful here as a description, not a reproach.) This RFK marched with Cesar Chavez and the farm workers. He called for an end to poverty and racial inequality in the US. He condemned the war in Vietnam. He might well have been elected president if he hadn't been assassinated on the June day in Los Angeles during which Bobby takes place. Would the charisma ever turn into leadership? We would never have a chance to know. The promise of Bobby Kennedy has been the stuff of TV docudramas for years.

And Martin Sheen, a rich retiree in this one, has played a politician or two. Estevez's competently made ensemble drama stands above the TV movie stuff, although there's schtick and some real preaching here and there. Between bookends of archival footage with  voice-overs of Kennedy's speeches, some of which are eloquent (especially given the poverty of oratory in our time), we see the lives of people brought together simply because they are in the same hotel at the same time, whether it's in the kitchen or the bridal suite. We start in the kitchen, where Mexican busboys complain about working double shifts, and we end in the kitchen, where RFK is shot by Sirhan Sirhan when the candidate goes in on a victory lap to shake hands with the staff after winning the primary.

There are homages to Grand Hotel here, as Estevez weaves between the trivial and the universal among retirees who can't leave the place (Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte), Kennedy volunteers introduced to LSD on the premises, a drunken cabaret singer and her frustrated husband (Demi Moore and Estevez), a good hearted manager (William H Macy) who's cheating on his manicurist wife (Sharon Stone) and sleeping with a cute telephone operator (Heather Graham) who hopes screwing the boss will get her a promotion. As the Kennedy crowd fills up the hotel, also staying there is a young girl (Lindsay Lohan) who is about to marry a draftee (Elijah Wood) in an arranged deal to keep him from being sent to Vietnam.

Even the humble roles are played well. Given the number of stars who signed on to this project, there don't seem to have been divas in this dream-team cast. Laurence Fishburne leads the way as a sous chef (working for a bastard of a boss, Christian Slater) who's dealt with his racial anger, and lectures his angry younger co-workers about it. Of course, in the larger scheme, anger triumphs, putting a bullet in RFK's head.

The production design takes you back to the feel if not the premises of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, an enclosed world unto itself, or so we thought. You feel nostalgic for the times and for the fashion, or at least the style that Sharon Stone, Heather Graham and Joy Bryant can bring to it. Yet films that reconstruct history are more about our time than about the history that they reassemble. In Bobby, set in a time that we associate with political upheaval, most of the characters in the hotel are looking at politics obliquely, if at all. Perhaps they're looking for leadership beneath the charisma.

Every era looks to another time for wisdom and leadership. Few eras have found so little of either in the leaders that we have before us now.  This longing for leaders or even for slogans that sound right may help explain why John Lennon's congenial nostrums in The US vs. John Lennon sound as good as they do, more than 30 years later, even though the authorized documentary that premiered in Toronto was a missed opportunity to analyze Lennon's gentle politics and the venality of the campaign against him. (See the doc anyway - part of the Lennon story is a lot better than nothing, and there's music.)

Stand this longing for the dreamy 60s on its head, and you'll see at least part of the appeal of Death of a President directed by Gabriel Range, which won the FIPRESCI award in Toronto. Having seen the film about the gunning down of Bush and the killing's aftermath (and liked it much more than some of those who now deplore it), I find it's not the kind of film that usually wins an award at a major film festival. The film is a thriller with a tactile volatility to its scenes of a street demonstration that flies out of control (and a believable integration of archival footage and dramatized scenes) - but it's the kind of project that gets downgraded into sub-cinema as it's lumped in with journalistic docs and TV movies. I admire the refinement of a project that could have been crude, yet I'm still surprised that critics are honoring it as cinema, out of so many films from which they had to pick. Bush antipathy has to play a role here somewhere. When you see the film, you see that there's nothing out-for-blood or exultant about it. Its real concern is the Bush legacy of fear-mongering and reduced civil liberties. Notwithstanding the friends of Bush who are condemning the film - without seeing it, I'm sure - it's a legacy that Bush will be defending (or ignoring) into his old age. The film ends on a mournful note - not for Bush, but for the country that his presidency diminished.

Another odd reflection on Toronto this year. Eclipsed by the gun-fest in Montreal was a triple murder at the Delta Chelsea Hotel. When details were even sketchier than they are now, it was announced that three tourists were dead on the 19th floor, with blood on the walls. Two were Swiss, and one was German, and the bloodbath seemed to be a revenge-killing on the part of the Swiss man, who found his companion in bed with the German. The killing was achieved, in a ghoulishly appropriate way, with a Swiss Army knife, the same tool that was used for the killer's suicide. Soon a rumor emerged, printed by the Toronto Globe and Mail, that all three of the dead were deaf - hence, no screams. These were plot twists that some of the scripts in the program could have used, but the story seemed to die in all but the tabloid Toronto Sun. Were the other papers fearful that news of three murders would send other tourists packing? The front pages featured threesomes of actresses on the red carpet who had no doubt played murderers and murder victims in films. Once again, cinema won out over reality.

Posted by dwhudson at September 17, 2006 4:55 AM