Ethel Kennedy

This is an amazing documentary, based on an interview with Ethel Kennedy, the wife of Robert Kennedy. It has extensive film footage of the public and private lives of the Kennedy family, particularly Robert and Ethel's; however, there are many views of the extended family. The interviewer is Ethel and Robert's youngest child, Rory. She does an excellent job of letting the viewer see her mother as a woman who has lived a full life with all its pain and joy. I never really knew Ethel Kennedy, although she was always a fixture in the Kennedy clan. After seeing this movie, I was moved by her honesty, her lack of pretense and her love for Bobby. She laughed at her hijinks, throwing a party for President Kennedy where the entire Cabinet ended up in the pool, or taking off on a scooter and crashing it during a trip to Rome. She talked about their two families and how they got along very well, despite being totally different. After Bobby's death, Ethel raised her children to be acutely aware of the poverty and hardship in the country and how important it is to work to overcome this divide. Her frankness was disarming. When asked about Bobby's climb of Mount Kennedy, named after his brother President Kennedy, she said, "He hated it". But he felt it was a challenge he had to take on. It was also clear that Ethel's faith is very deep and that she sees the tragic events as moments that all must encounter. In the meantime, we do what we can because we never know how long we have. Ethel Kennedy has had a long run and has done very well coping with her roller coaster life. After watching this documentary, I felt great admiration for her. I learned much about Ethel and her late husband, who I have always admired. I would gladly see this film again.

I'm not sure that Robert Kennedy's widow, Ethel really deserves the biographical treatment she gets here which might explain why the director and principal interviewer here is her own daughter Rory. The film focuses almost entirely on her relationship with her assassinated husband, giving just a few scant minutes to her life after his death in 1968. There's no question about her depth of feeling for him, after all they had eleven children together and all the surviving children (sadly, two of them have pre-deceased her at young ages) chime in with their memories of their parents.

Containing rare footage of their family at play as well as clips of Robert and Ethel's side-by-side career in public life, the film employed a traditional back-to-front approach to tell its story in order. With Ethel cast as the little woman behind her man, her task it appears was to run their household, bring up their children and support her man on his various campaign trails.

As you might imagine from the home-made aspect of the film, there's not a lot of criticism or investigative questioning of the lives and careers of the Kennedys senior. Admittedly it was impossible to ignore Robert's early support for Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt as well as his admitting to initially supporting the war in Vietnam, but RFK always seemed big enough to admit his mistakes and more than most politicians, play his audiences straight. Maybe that's why it's sometimes said his death affected subsequent American history even more than his brother's. The film is similarly adulatory about his big brother Jack, but again there's no mention of JFK's philandering, or the Bay of Pigs fiasco to name but two and wasn't Bobby rumoured to be a lover of Marilyn Monroe too?

The malign influence of J Edgar Hoover barely gets mentioned and likewise other important figures of the time like LBJ, Martin Luther King and Jackie Kennedy are only fleetingly mentioned. I must admit too I cringed at all and sundry referring to their parents as "Mummy" and "Daddy" throughout.

Still alive as I write, the lady is wearing well and it's noticeable she never remarried, unlike Jackie. Overall, she appears to have been a good wife and mother, although other than her relationship to her sadly gone-too-soon husband, I think it's pushing it a little to justify a 90 minute tribute like this in her honour.

It's certainly a Kennedy narrative of the Kennedy family. While Ethel has some reverence, especially to her children, she is a bit the bipolar matriarch and is either quite pleasant or flat out crotchety to questions. They do well to sell the story of the democratic family with mass wealth and an agenda that it is, it's everyone else's responsibility to care for the less fortunate. They never really gave up anything up, as you will see, for said fight but they really ring their bell. While the family name did play a role in some significant history, good and bad, beyond Bobby and Jack, the rest were actually by proximity only, but they try to take a lot of credit. This rather long documentary should really be a drinking game and when mommy and daddy is said, toss one back and prepare to be utterly wasted in about 20 min.

An amazing documentary, intimate, legendary and inspirational. The Kennedy family's history is truly without comparison: the hope, the tragedies, the passion, the idealism, the hard clashes with reality, the bonds of tragedy and love, I dare say that it is impossible to experience life more intensely than this family has. And then Ethel stands tall through it all, an amazing woman, wife and (grand- )mother, with her unfaltering smile. If it wasn't for their passion for politics and the family fortune, the Kennedies could have made a fortune in toothpaste commercials.

Apparently Ethel sat behind Obama in 2008 at a funeral, whispering in his ear: "the torch has been passed to you". How about them goose bumps?

The first half of this film is a very in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the Kennedys...great if you're related to them by blood or friendship, or if you're a Kennedyphile...I am not. I felt like I could not relate to these rich, privileged white people, and I was flat-out bored. However, the second half focused heavily on RFK's accomplishments and sacrifices, and what made him tick. Certain anecdotes about lessons he taught his kids and his reasons for running for office made me wish more of our leaders were like him. Ethel's strength and contribution to the family were also striking, but this documentary is really much more compelling as an insider's view of RFK. I concluded that this film was worth watching because I don't think you'll be able to find this perspective and unique knowledge about RFK and his family in any other film. If you can suffer through the first half, the second half will be worth it.

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