by MATTHEW HAYS

The most memorable scene in Bobby, the directorial debut of actor Emilio Estevez, involves actresses Sharon Stone and Demi Moore. The former plays a hairdresser, tending to the latter, a drunken lounge singer. At one point, Moore states to Stone, “When you get older, people stop caring about you.” It’s ironic, of course, given the women’s fall from box-office grace. Fifteen years ago, they were both commanding multi-million-dollar fees for their work; now they are both the butt of late-night talk-show hosts’ jokes.

But it’s a very, very contrived irony—the kind that Bobby is rife with—making this whole project feel very, very belaboured. The premise is that we learn about the lives of a bunch of different people who work or are staying at the hotel where Bobby Kennedy got assassinated. Watch as the hopes and dreams of a generation get dashed, just as this hopeful and dreamy young politician is shot dead. (I know—it sounds really deep, but see if you can wrap your head around it.) Really, you need not attend, as I’ve just summed up the whole damn thing.

Estevez has certainly put together an impressive cast. And he’s doing his best to give them some good fodder to chew on. Sir Anthony Hopkins and Harry Belafonte play ageing idealists; William H. Macy is a philanderer; Christian Slater plays a racist who reforms himself; Helen Hunt does a neurotic. And that’s the shortlist.

The aspiration is to create another network narrative film, the kind Altman (RIP) first gave life to. A series of disparate characters are brought together by some incident—usually a car accident—but here through a traumatic historical event. Altman has been called an actor’s director, and for good reason. In films like Nashville and Short Cuts, he gave his actors a unique opportunity to create characters with depth, fleshing out his landmark films. The difference is, Altman gave his actors a film to hang their performances on—Estevez has the performances, but there’s little or no film to connect them to.

Bobby opens Friday, Nov. 24

>> Movie Listings