BOB ROBERTS
A film review by Jon Webb
Copyright 1992 Jon Webb
Tim Robbins plays a right-wing Christian fundamentalist folk singer who is running for Senator from Pennsylvania. The movie is supposed to be funny (it started as a "Saturday Night Live" skit), with Robbins singing songs like "Times are Changing Back" and "Complain, Complain, Complain" (about welfare recipients). But it's also supposed to be a serious attack on our present political structure, as it raises several familiar issues: for example, the import of drugs into this country to finance the Contras and diversion of money from failed S&Ls into right-wing causes.
The problem with this film is that it never quite gets to be either a parody or an "enhanced" documentary, like JFK. You have on the one hand Gore Vidal (as the incumbent senator) railing against the NSC secretly running the country, and on the other hand song lyrics something like "We marched for the poor, we marched to be free, we marched for self-interest..." and "This land is my land, this land is our land...." It's a little too serious to be funny, and a little too funny to be serious.
It's still fun, though. Giancarlo Esposito is great as the anti-establishment reporter who follows Bob Roberts around and digs up the dirt connecting him with a failed S&L and drug-running (somehow he seems to have avoided being caught up with INSLAW, unless one of his employees was discussing it in German or Japanese). Tim Robbins himself has just about the right blend of passion and humor that a right-wing folk singer would have. Some of his followers acquire the hypnotized eyes of youth before an idol, and that's fun too. The MTV videos are quite good, blending the kind of quirkiness that would appeal to the young with right wing passion. And there are a lot of cameo appearances; it's almost as if this film had the same kind of appeal for stars wanting to make as statement with a day or two of work that JFK did.
But I wish that Robbins (who directed the film) had either restrained himself and made the movie as an ironic send-up of right-wing politics, or really let himself go, the way Oliver Stone did, and really tried to convince us that all this was true, more or less. These days, with Bush all but defeated, in significant part because of the prominence of right-wing fundamentalists during the Republican convention, simply raising the spectre of the right wing doesn't provide enough scare value to drive a film.
-- J
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