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Written and directed by actor Tim Robbins (who also plays the title role), this 1992 mock documentary about an upstart candidate for the U.S. Senate is smart, funny, and scarily prescient in its foreshadowing of the Republican revolution of 1994. Bob Roberts is a folksinger with a difference: He offers tunes that protest welfare chiselers, liberal whining, and the like. As the filmmakers follow his campaign, Robbins gives needle-sharp insight into the way candidates manipulate the media. While the film follows Roberts's campaign, it also covers a fringe journalist (Giancarlo Esposito), who may have dug up the kind of dirt to push Roberts's campaign off the rails. Robbins captures the chilly insincerity of this right-wing populist and fills his cast with terrific supporting players, including Alan Rickman as the campaign's shadowy financier and Susan Sarandon and Peter Gallagher as a pair of airhead TV news anchors.
--Marshall Fine
From The New Yorker
Tom Robbins is the writer, director, and star of this mock documentary that chronicles, C-SPAN style, the senatorial campaign of a young radical-right demagogue. Bob Roberts is a folksinger: instead of giving speeches, he picks up an acoustic guitar and invites his audiences to sing along with his reactionary "protest" anthems. He's Pat Buchanan in Woody Guthrie's clothing, and what's scary about the movie is that this grotesque coupling doesn't even feel like a stretch. Robbins works like an inspired political cartoonist: this picture is his chance to have his say on everything that's been bugging him for the past twelve years, and he makes the most of it. He tosses off nasty satiric riffs at a reckless, headlong pace, and the movie, even at its most chilling, is hilarious; its humor is both precise enough to deflate its targets and goofy enough to feel liberating. And his performance as smiling Bob, although it's conceived as a caricature, is never tiresome: it's too finely detailed, and too gleeful. The picture is a down-and-dirty exercise in negative campaigning, and it's bracing to see some mean, memorable zingers coming from the left. Wittily, Robbins has appropriated for his own purposes the attack-dog campaign style of the right wing. This terrifically entertaining movie represents something very unlikely and very welcome: liberal humor with sharp teeth. Also with Gore Vidal, Alan Rickman, Giancarlo Esposito, Brian Murray, and Ray Wise. Many familiar performers turn up in juicy cameos: John Cusack, Bob Balaban, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, Pamela Reed, Peter Gallagher, James Spader, Helen Hunt, and the country singer Kelly Willis. Tim Robbins wrote the lyrics of Bob Roberts' songs; David Robbins (his brother) wrote the music. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
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