“stay in school… and don’t take crack; it’s a ghetto drug.”

Bob Roberts is a senatorial candidate with a mission. He’s adopted the rebel persona but he’s a rebel conservative, a staunchly right-wing figure whose agenda is to obliterate wishy-washy liberal thinking, hang the drug dealers, champion self-interest and cast aside pathetic state hand-out scroungers… and he’s going to do it all with the aid of his guitar…

Back in 1992, with the support of Working Title, a British company, because American distributors would not touch the project, Tim Robbins wrote, directed and starred in a blistering satirical mock-documentary following the fortunes of ultra-conservative folk-singing senatorial hopeful Bob Roberts. The concept of the film is simple; documentary maker Terry Manchester (Brian Murray) follows Bob on the campaign trail, closely minded by Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman), the Roberts campaign manager, a shadowy character with an even more murky past.

In a piece of inspired casting, Roberts opponent, the incumbent senator, Brickley Paiste, is played by Gore Vidal, in a weary, all-too-human way. Failing to appeal to the public in the same way as the fast talking, smooth singing Roberts, and unable to fight dirty, he attempts to win the public over to reality, “not image”, but of course that’s the point of this Robbins show: get the image right, and the public, for good or bad, will follow. I was lucky enough to watch this again following a Q&A with Robbins himself, and he told us that some of the most touching, powerfully hopeless moments came straight from Vidal himself and were unscripted. As a man who has suffered the slings and arrows of politics, he understood the message of Bob Roberts all too well.

Against the Roberts tide stand a few liberal souls (mostly, interestingly, portrayed in a rather lunatic fashion, but we’ll come back to that), most notably Bugs Raplin (Giancarlo Esposito), a scruffy journalist for a tiny liberal publication who has his hack’s hooks into some curious gaps in the investigation of Lukas Hart for gun-running and drug trafficking. Can Raplin hope to stand up against the onslaught? Roberts is surrounded by desperate admirers (look out for Jack Black in an early role; oddly he pops up as Sean Penn’s brother in Dead Man Walking as well)…

The film opens with Roberts’ signature song, Complain, one that I remembered for a good ten years after I first saw the film. It’s the song (written by Tim and David Robbins) that really sums up the heart of the Roberts campaign. I was maybe fourteen years old and really understood satire for the first time when I heard these dulcet phrases:

“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
So give me a handout while I complain…”

I take it I don’t have to explain much more about Roberts’s politics! The fact is, whether you veer left or right (and I take a fairly central ground myself), the fact that Roberts is a semi-fascist political nightmare (whether or not Paiste is an effective political alternative) is fairly obvious.

Robbins doesn’t restrict his pot-shots to the overtly right, either. Roberts’s appearance on the SNL-doppelganger Cutting Edge Live portrays it to be a hopeless puppet show, as the two people on the show who have any sort of political conscience (including a surly cameo from John Cusack) are sidelined and ousted for the sake of political upsuckage. How much of this is true of Saturday Night Live, I couldn’t tell you. But Robbins is a man just as prepared to fight the left and the centre as the right for what he believes in (as he explained to someone who asked him about his continuing between-election activism as opposed to those who disappear post-election: “I work for Kerry because I’m ABB… Anybody But Bush… but we have to make sure Kerry takes the right road… we can’t just be politically active every four years… that’s why we got into trouble at the Oscars that year… we were criticising a Clinton policy, what, 2 months into his office? We were supposed to just be happy and shut up…”).

Interestingly, the lefty characters are all portrayed as ranting nutters against the tide… whereas Bob is a smooth character whose veneer only cracks when he’s supposed to be off camera. His audacity (especially with the stunning events of the latter part of the film) is carried off with sly charm, whereas the ramblings of Raplin sound like conspiracy theory. I happen to think this is part of Robbins’s genius… it becomes apparent over time how sane Raplin is under the ramble, and how insane Roberts is under the veneer. And the Roberts crew, ghoulish mob that they become, are distinctly unsettling.

The most important thing about Bob Roberts as a film, though, is that it is, at times, cripplingly hysterical. The two music videos, “Wall Street Rap” (taking the Dylan-subversiveness of the album from which it is taken “Times Are Changin’ Back” to new levels) and “I Want To Live” are screamingly funny, and some of the one-liners (such as my opening quote, levelled at a 7 year old girl) prompted a blast of laughter even from an audience subdued by Dead Man Walking. The cameos from Robbins stalwarts such as long-term partner Susan Sarandon and James Spader as news anchors draw wry smiles. Performances are all pitch-perfect, especially Alan Rickman and Robbins himself, and the direction spot-on. One meandering scene where Roberts is herded in and out of labyrinthine corridors under a theatre whilst being persistently questioned by Raplin is particularly perfect.

The folky music, composed by Robbins with his brother, is perfect, so much so, in fact, that it justifies Robbins’s decision to stop the release of a soundtrack album since he didn’t like the idea of the songs being played out of the context of the film. Frankly they’re all too catchy and likeable, and the message could easily get lost if not grounded in the satire.

Of course the very scariest thing about Bob Roberts is that twelve years on, it’s never been more relevant. The film makes copious references to the Gulf War, and the padding of the military budget, the ownership of the news and the ownership of weapons of mass destruction (yes, that phrase appears in the film on John Cusack’s lips). There is a core of desperate pleading to this film, but it’s not preachy, and it’s chillingly accurate even now.

At heart, whether Roberts’s politics (and indeed Robbins’s) appall or appeal, this is an interesting, hilarious and debate-sparking film… an intelligent film, in fact, and well worth 102 15-rated minutes out of your life.

Alex
xxx