Yesterday, as I checked the mail at my P.O. Box, there was a little disc-mailer containing a case-less DVD of Emilio Estevez's 2006 film Bobby. As a devotee to Lindsay Lohan's film career, I had purchased the thing used over the internet, with a sort of "better late than never" attitude. Bobby is an interesting case. The film was quite well-received, winning several awards (Best break-out actress: Lindsay Lohan) Yet the movie did nothing at the box office and sold less DVDs than I Know Who Killed Me. Maybe that's because the movie is--well--boring, slowly imploding under the weight of the distractingly and confusingly star-studded cast. A useful and, I think, inevitable, exercise is to compare and contrast the movie with another Lohan-graced flop, Georgia Rule. And, after only a little reflection, I can confidently say that the Rule is the finer film.
Strangely, the two movies are, in many ways, sort of mirror images of each other, or opposite sides of the same coin. Georgia Rule stars Felicity Huffman as a delusional alcoholic; Bobby stars Williams H. Macy as a self-righteous prick. In Bobby, Lindsay Lohan has a bit part as a woman who selflessly marries some schmuck so he doesn't have to go to Vietnam, then (wait for it...) falls in love with him, whereas in Georgia Rule LL stars as a monumentally selfish girl who becomes intrigued with the possibility of preventing a Mormon boy from going on his mission, then realizes she's become dependent on his Platonic companionship. Both films feature particularly trying, extremely mannered direction--Emilio Estevez channeling Robert Altman, corralling dozens of actors and extras as his camera people do their 100th down-the-hall-and-around-the-corner-and-into-a-different-room take, and Gary Marshall being, well, overly Gary Marshall I guess. Bobby (supposedly) received a seven-minute standing ovation at The Venice Film Festival; Georgia Rule was universally panned by critics and audiences alike. Bobby is like a 3-ring circus with a million things happening at once, while Georgia Rule's story has one moving part. Perhaps most importantly, both movies are great examples of how people totally steeped in Hollywood's weird pseudo-reality can take any subject matter and make it utterly unrelatable to anyone born outside the TMZ.
Either way, for all of the films' parallel fuck ups, Bobby is the bigger fuck up of the two films. Bobby is one of those Hollywood back-patting circle-jerks that can only appeal to Los Angeles County liberals who truly believe that giving lip service to race issues and supporting one fabulously wealthy, magazine-cover-handsome man forty years ago makes them monumentally Good people forever. Georgia Rule, by contrast, pandered to absolutely no one--one might say to a fault. To Georgia Rule's credit, the film was able to take extremely commonly-treaded subject matter and make a huge splash with it. Even if the impression Georgia Rule left the audience with was one of confusion or even disgust, it makes more of an impression than Bobby, which is able to take an exceptionally exciting subject matter and do nothing but make a yawn-fest for all non-Venetians. Honestly, why do I give a shit that the hotel's retired doorman is really good at chess? And why the fuck is he hanging out with Harry Belafonte? Is Harry Belafonte paying himself in this movie? And by that point, you've lost the viewer for good. I don't mean to totally shit on Bobby, because there are some nice things about it; Christian Slater is quite good as the (admittedly totally one-dimensional) racist kitchen and hospitality manager, and the few brief scenes featuring Nick Cannon as the temperamental, hard-ass young black RFK campaign worker are awesome. I guess, when it comes down to it, the main problem with Bobby is the same simple problem the viewer encounters with most Hollywood movies--not enough Lindsay!
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