Bob Roberts (1992)

reviewed by
Frank Maloney


                                 BOB ROBERTS
                       A film review by Frank Maloney
                        Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney

BOB ROBERTS is a film directed and written by Tim Robbins and produced by Fred Murray. It stars Tim Robbins, Gore Vidal, Giancarlo Esposito, Ray Wise, Alan Rickman. It is rated R for mature themes.

BOB ROBERTS is Tim Robbins's nearly perfect debut as a writer-director-star. The debut takes the form of a devastating, mock-documentary satire of new-right politics, a satire inspired by the rise of David Duke. Robbins has acknowledged THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984) as his primary inspiration. Like SPINAL TAP, BOB ROBERTS begins with the music industry, but the new film quickly leaves most of that behind as it takes up and develops a chronicle of a too-true-to-be-funny Pennsylvania senatorial campaign. Roberts is a Young Conservatives' version of Bob Dylan, a folksinger who trades foreign currencies between gigs and whose songs praise getting rich and denounce the poor and disadvantaged as the enemy. His opponent is a patrician veteran, played wisely and humorously by Gore Vidal (he improvised some of his own dialog), an old-fashioned liberal who is cynical about the political process even while remaining passionate about his vision of government and the American spirit. The campaign takes place in the months before the outbreak of the Gulf War.

The comparison with Dylan is explicit in Roberts's album cover art and music videos, but with titles like "The Times They Are A-Changin' Back" and "This Land Is Made For Me." A lot of people, especially young whites from privileged classes, are shown idolizing Roberts, but some other folks see through him. His slipperiness and his uncanny ability to defang his attackers is only a hint of his dark determination to win.

Even darker is the presence of an eminence grise played by Alan Rickman, a shadowy backer with even more shadowy connections to the CIA and the savings-and-loan scandal. Rickman is excellent in his single-minded and frightening grimness.

Giancarlo Esposito plays with growing hysteria and fatalism the persistent investigative reporter for the counterculture press. His performance merges seamlessly with Jean Lepine's cinema-verite-style camerawork to create a convincing illusion of a sensational story unfolding before us.

Other performers of note include Susan Sarandon, James Spader, and Pamela Reed, who wittily play news-anchors down to the last blow-dried hair.

But, of course, it is Tim Robbins who carries the movie and the day. Fresh from the triumph of THE PLAYER. He has created a funny black comedy, a convincing character study, and a first-rate political/paranoia conspiracy movie. The aim as well as the accomplishment goes far beyond that of SPINAL TAP. I was intensely impressed by the pacing of the story, as we move from Life Styles of the Rich and Politically Ambitious narrated by a British documentary maker through increasingly disturbing questions about the goals and methods of the Roberts campaign until we end in a morass of the worst sort. Yet never does Robbins allow the documentary conventions to slip (like ZELIG and unlike CITIZEN KANE). The only time we see Roberts "off-camera" is when he is tricked into thinking the all-seeing red eye was off. It means that the film has to exploit irony to a degree seldom seen in an American film. Alternate points of view come through talking heads, not through dramatic situations, generally. And Robbins, himself, has to put in a less strenuous acting job and can glide largely on his natural charm, thus taking some of the pressure off him as writer and director, to say nothing of composing and performing Roberts's horrible songs.

I simply cannot recommend BOB ROBERTS too highly to you. It is original, fully realized, entertaining, smart, and chilling. Pay what you must but see it.

-- 
Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney
.

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