Bob Roberts

For his debut feature film Tim Robbins reworked a Saturday Night Live sketch into a story about a fictional self-made millionaire right-wing Senate candidate, Bob Roberts, a smarmy “yuppie fascist”, who uses knee-jerk, hate-mongering tactics packaged in the ol’ red white and blue rhetoric in his all-out attempt to get to the White House.

Whilst its intentions are laudable Bob Roberts is a heavy-handed satire with a one-note premise. Yes, Robbins is effective as the perpetually ingratiating would-be Senator but about thirty minutes of watching him play the self-righteouspatriot as he is shuttled around the campaign trail by his team of sycophants and minders (including Alan Rickman as his archly nefarious campaign manager) is enough to get the point, explicitly articulated by Gore Vidal who plays Roberts’ political opponent, Brickley Paiste – that America is run by a military-industrial oligarchy with global pretensions and the media in their back pocket (time-wise the film sits between Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair on the one hand, and the Bush years and Saddam Hussein on the other)..  

Although there are some successful elements such as the recreation of television newscasts, the film doesn’t work as a mockumentary as it is too obviously in the service of its political message to appear life-like whilst Roberts' awful songs (which, bizarrely enough, invert their Woody Guthrie/ Bob Dylan models) and Robbins' tuneless delivery are hard to take. There is fun to be had however in playing spot-the-actor with Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, David Strathairn, Helen Hunt and James Spader in the cast as well as a young and slim Jack Black making his big screen debut

 

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