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As Good As It Gets

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Okay, make no mistake: Bob Roberts is definitely not the most subtle film ever made. It's not so much a veiled attack on the American right-wing as it is an all singing, all dancing celluloid spit in the Republican party's face. It's also as paranoid as a junkie, and almost proudly one sided, which might be why it has slipped into relative obscurity - it's a film that could be very easily dismissed as a piece of left-wing propaganda, directed by and starring Tim Robbins, an outspokenly leftist actor.But, Bob Roberts is a film that deserves a lot more attention than it receives, largely because unlike a lot of political comedies, it's actually funny. Bob Roberts is a mockumentary about a right wing politician/folk singer named (unsurprisingly) Bob Roberts. Roberts is a kind of anti Bob Dylan, whose modus operandi is to emulate the spirit of the folk singing radicals and then deliberately turn their message on its head - he sings songs about enforcing the death penalty on drug dealers, and the positives of investing in the stock market. Dylan provides such an obvious touchstone for the character that it's arguable the whole film is as much a spoof of the Dylan documentary Don't Look Back as it is a political satire.  The songs are a good example of what makes this film work. Sure, they're unashamedly political and barbed - they're the kind of spoofs that you'll now find dime a dozen on youtube - but they are so painfully earnest and straightfaced that they're kind of hypnotic. In Bob Roberts, Robbins has created a character who absolutely believes the terrible and terrifying things he sings about, and he plays the part with a wide eyed enthusiasm that makes you laugh, but in that oh so unsettling "I'm genuinely disturbed by this" kind of way.  The jokes are totally underplayed, save for an out of place 'before they were famous' Jack Black cameo appearance. He's the only actor who inhabits his role as if it's meant to be funny, all but giving the audience a big fourth wall breaking wink. Everyone else, however, lets the humour come naturally from the insanity of what they're saying: they don't gurn to the camera. From Alan Rickman's performance as the shadowy Big Business agent to Gore Vidal as Bob Roberts' running mate, the rest of the cast play the thing totally straight-faced.Sure, the movie's pretty preachy, but it never becomes boring: at a lean 102 minutes, it's a freight train of a film, spitting out characters, situations, and genuinely thrilling plot twists.Best of all is the film's ending, which is as cutting as the punchline to a sick joke. There's no messing around to this one. The conclusion socks you in the guts then carries on its way, whistling Bob Roberts' "Drugs Stink" as it goes.

It's interesting that Tim Robbins picked Pennsylvania of all places for his satirical film Bob Roberts. Written, directed, and starring Tim Robbins, it's the story of a rightwing folksinger entertainer who rises to be United States Senator from that state with a big hint of further ambition. For in 1994 one Rick Santorum was elected in that Republican year in that state against a comfortable liberal named Harris Wofford in much the same manner as Robbins's Bob Roberts defeats Senator Brickley Paiste.Santorum was Bob Roberts without the singing. Once again life does imitate art.For satire to be successful it must be both humorous and have the touch of chiffon. This is the reason that Dr. Strangelove as a film succeeds so brilliantly and why Bob Roberts fails. Robbins's film has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He did satirize one thing in Bob Roberts quite brilliantly, but without even knowing it I'm sure. Gore Vidal's character of Senator Brickley Paiste is nothing short of brilliant for the wrong reasons. He plays the part of a comfortable old, fashionably liberal Senator who has lost contact with the grassroots brilliantly. And I do so love that Dickensian name.Once upon a time the Democratic was confident and assured in its way of being the majority party with its alliance with big labor and big city political machines to turn out the vote. It's dirty little secret was that it relied on generations old resentments from the children and grandchildren of immigrant arrivals who were treated really bad by the Republican party and its WASP base. Where I grew up in Brooklyn, people were taught to vote the Column on the voting machine with the star which is the Democratic symbol in New York State. Just go down the row even if Caligula's horse is there.A man like Brickley Paiste came on the scene in 1960 as he says in his whiny valedictory with John F. Kennedy and that was around the height of the Democrat's confident majority. Times and issues do change and I won't do a history of what happened in those thirty years. One thing was that workers went from over 50% unionized to about half of that.Another was the rise of Political Action Committees, Republicans did it first and still do it best. A third was sadly the religious right with no real effort to counter it from the other end of the spectrum. All this and more combined to make the Democratic majority ripe for the taking in 1994 in which the Santorum-Wofford race was a small part.But if life does imitate art we are pleased with the fact in 2006 Rick Santorum became an ex-Senator probably more to do with the fact he was just too conservative ultimately for a place like Pennsylvania than anything else. So the real life Bob Roberts does go down, Brickley Paiste is vindicated.Even in the days of television and the internet you still can't fool all the people all the time.

"Times are changing back, times are changing back, times are changing back today...", sings ultra-right-wing politician/folksinger Bob Roberts. Grandmommies & -daddies who know just-who-the-heck Bob Dylan was might remember his song "The times, they are a-changing" — yeah, that was waaaaay back when Grandmommy & Granddaddy wore flowers, made free love and smoked marijuana to make their hair grow faster. And peace, No-to-Vietnam, civil rights and all that hot sh*t, in the year I was born (but not in the USA). Somebody else pointed out the Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back", from which several scenes were derived — including the one where Bob Roberts and his blonde co-singer practice their hymn "We're marching for self-interest" while Bob checks his stocks on his laptop. In 1967, Joan Baez sang "Pretty Polly".Polly, pretty Polly, come and go along with me / Before we get married some pleasure to seekHe led her over mountains and valleys so deep / Polly misjudged him and she began to weepSayin' Willie, Oh Willie, I'm afraid of your ways / The way you've been ramblin' you'd lead me astrayHe said, Polly, pretty Polly, your guess is about right / I dug on your grave the best part of last nightI don't know much about US politics, although I sometimes wonder why they apparently have only two political parties since at least 200 years. But "Bob Roberts" is not an American movie, although it portrays the rise of a pure-bred American Hitler. Those two parties exist virtually everywhere, at least in every Western "democracy", and although they take turns every few years and have other names, the underlying power structure is the same, as their politics are increasingly the same.This is a movie for the grassroots, a socio-political comment and a satire. It's supposed to stimulate the little gray cells, look at our leaders and our TV screens and ask, are we getting what we signed up for? What is the truth, and do I want to know?

Bob Roberts is a timely movie about national political cynicism that was intended to satirize the Republican Revolution of 1994. Others have contended the subject of the satire was the Reagan 80s, against the Gordon Gekko "Greed is Good" crowd. But it could not be more appropriate to the rise and ascendancy of the Bush II clique. Roberts, a Pennsylvania Senate candidate , is a rich, smarmy, guitar-strumming, media savvy corporate shill. He sings folk songs about the joys of strip mining, stock-market success, and capital punishment for drug dealers...For my complete review of this movie and for other movie and book reviews, please visit my site TheCoffeeCoaster.com.Brian Wright Copyright 2007