Jingle Bells: RFK - 1964

Surrounded by his children, his wife Ethel, Sammy Davis, Jr. (a jester without a court), as he visits schoolchildren around the city, RFK is every bit the good patriarch and dutiful public servant. But it’s the films’ fleeting, in-between, moments where Pennebaker most precisely hits the mark, offering reflection on the possibilities that Robert Kennedy’s all too brief life foreclosed. Set against the pageantry of a long ago Christmas, the film speaks to tragic contingencies of history lying far beyond the ken of politics that continue to circumscribe the tortured destiny of our country.