CINEMA: Stanley Peskin
WRITTEN and directed by Tim Robbins, Bob Roberts (1992) has more than a passing resemblance to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), as well as to a number of films by Robert Altman, notably Nashville (1975) and The Player (1992), in which Robbins himself played a corrupt filmmaker.
Originally a sketch for Saturday Night Live in 1985 (mildly satirised as Cutting Edge Live in the film), Bob Roberts works as a very funny and abrasive pseudo- documentary about a folk singer who wants to become United States senator for Pennsylvania. In the course of the film, Roberts, who like Kane is typically American, is seen from several points of view and prompts various responses. Altman’s influence is apparent in Robbins’ use of a multi-layered soundtrack and a large gallery of characters.
Roberts’ rise to power is documented without the ambiguity or mystery that surrounds the protagonist in Welles’ film. There can be little doubt about his reactionary beliefs or his political chicanery and malfeasence. He is clearly associated with a number of presidents who have headed America in the last few decades. Robbins has described his hero-villain as George Bush with a guitar. He would seem to be taking a side-swipe at the Kennedy brothers and their fondness for the media as a means to power. Almost certainly, he is attacking Ronald Reagan (RR) and his administration. A black woman reporter compares Roberts with Nixon, “only he’s shrewder”.
Although Robbins as actor plays a character who is totally self-serving and rightwing, as director and screenplay writer, his own political beliefs are liberal and democratic. His film is a scathing attack on the media and power politics. Where Kane in Welles’ film used newspapers to promote himself, Roberts exploits TV. Robbins’ assault on TV is as lethal as Robert Redford’s protest in Quiz Show. News reporters are shown smiling toothily as they endorse a “yuppie fascist” who is a secret drug-dealer, a crook and a murderer.
As in Nashville, the musical industry is seen as a microcosm of American society. Roberts makes his appeal to the youth as a folk-singer: clearly country and western music is a potent means to success. He is described as a man who not only has “a brilliant mind and a wonderful wit, but he can also sing”. The songs — Bob on Bob and Wall Street Rag — are a pastiche of Bob Dylan, of Subterranean Homesick Blues and the advertising draws on Dylan album covers. Robbins offers an amusing subversion of Dylan’s work. Dylan who identified folk music with the civil rights movement, wrote lyrics and expressed sentiment which can hardly read as a rightwing manifesto.
Perhaps the most terrifying feature of the film is Robbins’ treatment of the adolescent supporters of Roberts’ cause. When a young man says, “He’s amazing. He’s a poet and a genius,” the Nazi youth movement of the 1930s comes to mind. Roberts receives, too, the sanction of the church: a minister with arms uplifted intones, “Pave the way for a rebel’s path to Washington”.
Roberts’ Democratic opponent is Senator Brickley Paiste, the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by Roberts’ team, dryly played by a very urbane Gore Vidal. Ironically, Robbins’ own political sentiments are likely to be closer to the democratic convictions expressed by Paiste whose speeches, I suspect, may have been written by Vidal himself.
There are first-rate performances from Giancarlo Esposito as investigative reporter Bugs Raplin who unsuccessfully attempts to derail Roberts’ ride to Washington, and Alan Rickman as Lukas Hart III, Roberts’ lawyer and right-hand man. Rickman, who was memorable as the nasty Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, surpasses himself here. He is both sinister and sanctimonious as, dodging questions from reporters, he says, “Excuse me, I have to go pray.”
Although the film is set in the 1960s, it is a pithy commentary on the last four decades of America’s political life. As such, it epitomises Robbins’ disenchanted view of the American Dream as a history of moral compromise.