When Tim Robbins’
mockumentary Bob Roberts was released
in 1992 it was regarded as topical biting political satire, taking jabs at both
Democrats and Republicans as well as the media that covers them. The film’s
titular character was a hilariously creepy mash-up of Bob Dylan and Gordon
Gekko, one that seemed like an extreme character carefully crafted by Robbins
to comment on the political climate at the time. George Bush was on his way out
of the Presidency making way for Bill Clinton and so Bob Roberts acted as kind of a transition between them.
In retrospect, Robbins was
trying to warn us. It’s now 2016 and America is in danger of electing a
real-life Bob Roberts in the form of billionaire tycoon Donald Trump. Both men
are polarizing figures appealing to disenfranchised white people on a grass
roots level that is as fascinating to watch as it is more than a little scary
because they tap into an ugly xenophobic streak that lurks in the heart of the
country. As a result, Robbins’ film has gradually morphed from mockumentary
into documentary.
Bob Roberts
chronicles the titular character’s run for Senate in Pennsylvania as documented
by Terry Manchester (Brian Murray) and his British film crew. Born to hippie
parents, Roberts (Robbins) rebelled as a teen and enrolled in military school,
then went to Yale and from there earned a fortune on Wall Street. We get an
indication early on of Roberts’ true colors when he clashes with a television
talk show host (Lynne Thigpen) on a morning show over the 1960s, which he
claims was a “dark stain on American history,” in regards to social protest and
the counterculture. Afterwards, she is interviewed by Manchester and says of
Roberts, “Here’s a man who has adopted the persona and mindset of the
free-thinking rebel and turned it on itself,” which best sums up the aspiring
politician.
Roberts is running against
incumbent Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal) who represents old school politics and
is presented in the media as old and stuffy while the former is young and
dynamic, appealing to people that are tired of business as usual politics, but
this is merely a smoke screen to distract from the fact that he’s just as
corrupt as any established politician. He applies the ruthlessness of Wall
Street to politics, doing whatever it takes to get the votes needed to win.
Paiste points out that Roberts is very good at “the politics of emotion,” and
asks, “What’s behind it? I don’t see anybody home. But what I will say that
once or twice during the course of our debate I detected a slight whiff of
sulfur in the air.” Paiste represents the old guard who tried to make a
difference in politics but lost their way and were mired in its byzantine
procedures.
The late 1980s and early
1990s was very good to Tim Robbins with a breakout role in Bull Durham (1988) and then going onto being in three Robert Altman
films, including The Player (1992),
which earned him the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival. He wisely
parlayed the buzz that surrounded him into writing, directing and starring in
the low-budget Bob Roberts, which,
along with the aforementioned The Player
and his next Altman film Short Cuts
(1993), saw the actor play a trifecta of unlikeable men abusing their positions
of power. Not surprisingly, Bob Roberts
is the juiciest role of the three as he gives himself the plum role of a
neo-conservative folk singer cum businessman with aspirations to the Senate.
Robbins portrays Roberts as a man that plays it close to the vest, revealing
little about himself or what he truly believes in front of the cameras and is
content to spout soundbite rhetoric. There is an icy, smiling façade that
Roberts chillingly maintains throughout the film like a shark about to attack.
Ray Wise and Alan Rickman play
Roberts’ campaign chairman and manager respectively with the former always
upbeat and positive; grinning for the cameras while the latter is enigmatic and
stern only to be later embroiled in an Oliver North/Contragate-type scandal. A
young Jack Black pops up (in his feature film debut) as a particularly zealous
fan of Roberts and the actor memorably conveys the scary devotion of the aspiring
politician’s most rabid supporters.
Giancarlo Esposito plays
John Alijah “Bugs” Raplin, a fast-talking, muckraking journalist who writes for
underground publications and persistently attempts to get an interview with
Roberts. His goal is to dig up evidence of the campaign chairman’s shady
dealings and thereby implicating Roberts. Esposito does a fantastic job of
treading a fine line of conspiracy theorist who is doing the kind of relentless
legwork that mainstream publications used to do but that have by and large been
co-opted by corporations. Bugs represents the film’s angry voice as he rails
against the “dealmakers” that pass for politicians.
The amusing riffs on
Roberts’ Dylan-esque musical career include album covers that rip-off the
legendary folk singer’s and a music video for a song called “Wall Street Rap”
that copies the famous one for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” with female
dancers in the background that references the supermodel band that appeared in
Robert Palmer’s iconic video for “Addicted to Love.” One of the film’s
highpoints are the songs that Roberts performs throughout. They are hilarious
in their naked, ultra-conservative sloganeering with such song titles as “Times
Are Changin’ Back”, “Retake America”, and “Drugs Stink.” The lyrics to these
songs skewer conservatives’ hatred of anything the reeks of socialism as
“Complain” demonstrates:
“I don’t have a house. I don’t have a car.
I spend all my money getting drunk in a bar.
I wanna be rich. I don’t have a brain.
Just give me a handout while I complain.”
These songs flip the
traditional protest song on its head so that it is the conservatives that rail
against liberalism. With the possibility of these songs played straight and
their lyrics taken out of their satirical context, it is easy to see why
Robbins has never released the soundtrack. Can you imagine what Ted Cruz or
Marco Rubio would do with them? Robbins felt that they were “funny” and
“entertaining,” but out of context: “I don’t trust the songs. And I personally
don’t want to be driving in my car five years from now and hear that bile on
the radio.”
Robbins’ film also critiques
the media, in particular local news stations, which he satirizes by casting
well-known actors like Helen Hunt, James Spader, Fred Ward, and Peter Gallagher
among others in cameos as sycophantic newscasters blatantly sympathetic to
Roberts. Gallagher, in particular, is funny as a more obvious suck-up who
pathetically waves after Roberts even after the man has left the room. The film
suggests that these vapid T.V. personalities hitch themselves to Roberts’ gravy
train because they can sense that he will be the next big thing but are quick to
turn on him at the first hint of a serious scandal.
Stylistically, Bob Roberts is reminiscent of the heavy
metal mockumentary This is Spinal Tap
(1984) – at one point Roberts gets lost in an auditorium trying to find the
stage – and the Bob Dylan documentary Dont
Look Back (1967) – it adopts a similar cinema verite approach – with a dash
of Robert Altman’s Tanner ’88 (1988)
for good measure. Robbins mixes them all together to create a funny and smart
satire that takes aim at American politics and the media that covers it. The
film also critiques the tactics of campaigning and how it consists mostly of
ugly mudslinging, which, unfortunately, has only gotten worse. This makes Bob Roberts just as relevant today as it
was back in 1992 – in fact, maybe even more so with the rise of Donald Trump
and his fellow Republican nominees of which we can see more than a little of
Roberts in the agenda and rhetoric of Cruz, Rubio, et al.
Watching Bob Roberts recently, and in light of
Trump’s run for the Republican Party nomination, it is eerie how Robbins’ film
anticipates things that actually have happened in real-life. Like the violence
that has erupted at recent Trump rallies, we see a group of dissenters beaten
up by security at one of Roberts’ rallies that masquerade as concerts. Much
like some of Trump’s more enthusiastic supporters, we see Roberts’ fanatical
supporters mix it up with the protesters outside a venue after a concert. Most
interestingly, Roberts appears on Cutting
Edge Live, a Saturday Night Live-type
hip sketch comedy show, as its musical guest. Robbins’ long-time friend and
fellow actor John Cusack makes a cameo appearance as the host who openly shows
disdain for Roberts, which anticipated the protests of several Hispanic
organizations against Trump hosting SNL
in November 2015. Like Trump, Roberts uses bullying tactics and fascist
imagery, which seemed extreme in 1992 but are commonplace now.
The origins for Bob Roberts came from Tim Robbins’
dismay at returning home to Greenwich Village after being away for eight years
and finding that many artists and bohemian types had left only to be replaced
by a lot of franchises. “I started thinking about what would happen if all of
those businessmen picked up guitars.” Initially, he wrote Roberts as a
businessman folk singer and over time his ambitions for the character grew
until he had him entering politics. The impetus for the film was Robbins’
interest in “the Hollywoodization of Washington, in the complicity between the
media and politics and entertainment and how politics is becoming about image
and not substance.”
He began writing the
screenplay in 1986 and in the same year tried out the character on a sketch he
made for Saturday Night Live. Robbins
then spent the next few years trying to get it made as a feature film but the
political content scared off the studios in Hollywood and most potential
financial backers. The few independent producers that showed interest wanted
him to “make it a parody of satire, if you can believe that,” Robbins said. In
retrospect, he realized that the script wasn’t ready until two years before
actual filming took place. His increased clout as recognizable actor finally
convinced Working Title Films, a small British independent film company, to
provide the $4 million budget, which meant that all the actors, including the
likes of Alan Rickman, worked for scale.
After Bob Roberts received a very positive reaction at the 1992 Cannes
Film Festival, Miramax and Paramount Studios picked it up for distribution and
decided to release the film on Labor Day weekend to coincide with the upcoming
election with a modest advertising campaign in cities they felt it would play
well. Certain political reporters and media figures in New York, like ABC News
anchor Peter Jennings and John McLaughlin, host of the T.V. political show The McLaughlin Group, were courted by
the distributors at a special screening during the Democratic National
Convention to generate favorable buzz. In addition, influential publications
like Vanity Fair were shown an early
cut of the film.
Bob Roberts received mostly positive
notices from critics. Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “I
like its audacity, its freedom to say the obvious things about how our
political process has been debased – but if it had been only about campaign
tactics and techniques, I would have liked it more.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote,
“There’s big imagination at work here. The movie sometimes overstates its case,
but the music-making, success-oriented Bob represents an authentic American
political tradition.” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe wrote,
“Alan Rickman is magnificently malignant as Robbins’ crypto-fascist right-hand
man; his face is a frenzy of twitching tics…Also on the money are the three
neoconservative high schoolers who tail Bob everywhere, a collective
psycho-glint in their eyes. But Candidate Bob takes the cake, his
deer-in-the-headlights gaze trained on his own morning America.”
In
his review for The Los Angeles Times,
Kenneth Turan wrote, “Audacious, bracing, uncommonly timely, Bob Roberts would seem almost impossible
to pull off. So it is every much to Robbins’ credit as a filmmaker that he
manages to do so while rarely getting preachy and never neglecting the
importance of movement and excitement in keeping an audience involved.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum
wrote, “The functioning of media itself is Robbins’s true subject, and it’s
exciting to see him appropriating some of the ideas of his mentor Robert Altman
and giving them more bite than Altman ever has.” However, Entertainment Weekly gave it a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman
wrote, “Despite its cleverness, the movie isn’t really very funny; it’s
repetitive and a tad monotonous. And that failure, I think is tied to a certain
smugness at its core.” When asked about
the film in 2016, Robbins said, “What I was doing with that movie was [trying]
to shed a light on some of the hypocrisies that exist in the American political
system and the way the media covers politics, and unfortunately that is still
relevant and that movie still works today.”
In retrospect, Bob Roberts anticipates what the
Republican Party has become. In this respect, it is more than a bit spooky that
we are now seeing a fictional character like Roberts being brought to life by
actual people without a hint of irony or self-awareness. If Robbins’ film was
intended as a warning then it went largely unheeded as history, albeit
fictional, is repeating itself only instead of art imitating life, life is
imitating art.
SOURCES
Bibbani, William. “Tim Robbins
on A Perfect Day and Howard the Duck.” Crave Online.
January 12, 2016.
Galbraith, Jane. “The Bob
Thing: Bob Roberts Seeks ‘Smart, Hip’
Filmgoers Who’ll Vote with their Wallets.” Los Angeles Times. August 30,
1992.
Kloman, Harry. “Tim Robbins,
Running Hard.” The New York Times. January 12, 1993.
Murphy, Ryan. “Tim Robbins
is Hot – He’s Also Bothered in Bob
Roberts, the Film Satire He Wrote, Directed and Stars In, the
Actor-Activist Puts His Political Convictions on Display.” Philadelphia
Inquirer. September 13, 1992.
Roberge, Chris. “Tim Robbins
Campaigns for Bob Roberts and
Political Change.” The Tech. September 25, 1992.
Turan, Kenneth. “A
Calculated Crapshoot Pays Off for Tim Robbins.” Los Angeles Times. May
13, 1992.
