Everybody's Fine Blu-ray Review
About Goode.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 17, 2012
Everybody's Fine is ostensibly a remake of a 1990 Italian film entitled
Stanno tutti bene which starred
Marcello Mastroianni (and which was director Giuseppe Tornatore's follow up to
Cinema Paradiso), but there's more than a
whiff of the Jack Nicholson film
About Schmidt wafting through this
film's premise and execution. Much like Alexander Payne's 2002 wryly disheveled comedy,
Everybody's Fine
posits a recent widower, in this case Frank Goode (Robert De Niro), who sets out on a cross country tour to reconnect
with his children. If the Nicholson film couched its inherent melancholy with a liberal dose of curmudgeonly humor,
Everybody's Fine instead frames Frank's trek as a sort of very special
Hallmark Christmas made for
television movie. There's nothing in
Everybody's Fine that you haven't seen a hundred (maybe a thousand)
times before: a well meaning but emotionally tamped down father, adult children struggling with their own issues, and
a family dynamic that could only charitably be called dysfunctional, but the film is anchored by a heartfelt, if slightly
uncharacteristic, turn by De Niro, who (like Jack Nicholson) seems to be unable to really escape his own persona in films
as he grows older. The character of Frank is an interesting, if often seen, one: an aging retiree who has tried to do
"the right thing" his whole life, but who has spent so much time chasing The American Dream he's let real human
connections slip through his fingers. The film casts this all with a really ridiculously literal metaphor—Frank's career has
been coating telephone wires with PVC, something that has left his health in a precarious state of affairs, but which
presents director Kirk Jones ample opportunity to interject long, lingering shots of telephone wires, an obvious
reference to long distance communication. The irony here is that the Goode family seems to have been talking via cell
phones with not very good service, repeatedly asking each other "Can you hear me now?"
We get a quick snapshot of Frank's life right off the bat. This is a man who probably measures his lawn to make sure
each
blade of grass is the same height. Everything is in its place, his house is perfectly, almost pristinely, clean and order is
apparent in every jot and tittle of his life. But obviously everything is not as it seems. It becomes clear that Frank is
reeling from the recent death of his wife, and his emotional life is further set into turmoil when one by one his children,
who have promised to come visit him, all phone to tell him they can't make it. Despite warnings from his doctor that his
health could be compromised by travel, Frank decides if his "Mohammedan" children won't come to his mountain, the
mountain will in fact travel to them.
The film then ping pongs between travel sequences, where we get little snippets that reveal Frank's character, a kind of
blustering but well meaning man who is obviously proud of his accomplishments and perhaps even his children, but is
probably too pushy about it all, and the actual interactions with three of his four children. The fourth is son David, who
turns out not to be at his New York City apartment when Frank shows up unannounced, and whose disappearance
turns
out to be a major (and fairly melodramatic) plot point.
Frank's other kids
do turn out to be there when Frank arrives, though they are obviously not very happy to see
him. First up is advertising executive Amy (Kate Beckinsale), one of those glamorous professionals who lives in an
impossibly chic home and whose office is similarly over the top. Amy's home life seems to be reasonably intact, except
that her son (Lucian Maizel) is obviously nursing some resentment toward his father (Damian Young). Amy makes
several excuses as to why Frank can't stay there, and so he decides to set off to visit his son Robert (Sam Rockwell),
who is supposedly a top conductor. When he gets there, it turns out Robert is not exactly a conductor, and in fact is
even questioning his somewhat tenuous life as a professional musician. Robert, like Amy, tells his father he is too busy
to visit, and so Frank sets off to visit his last child, daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore), a dancer working in Las Vegas. In
the meantime Frank has a violent interchange with a street kid sleeping in the train station, losing his medication in the
scuffle.
Much like Amy, Rosie seems to be living an impossibly successful life, meeting her father in a stretch limousine and then
taking her father to her impossibly gorgeous penthouse apartment. When a friend drops off a baby for the pair to take
care of, and Frank overhears a message being left on the machine, he begins to discern that not everything is as
picture perfect as Rosie has made it out to be. Without his pills and sensing that he's unwanted by all of his children,
Frank makes the disastrous decision to fly back home, despite his doctor's previous warning that flying should be
completely off limits due to Frank's heart and lung problems.
That sets the film off into its maudlin but predictably emotionally wrenching finale, where Frank's ill health finally brings
his children together and forces them to reveal the truth about David. Part of what undercuts the film's effectiveness,
however, is the same literalness that is part and parcel of the ubiquitous shots of telephone wires. Every time Frank
looks at one of his now grown kids, we see things through his eyes, with his children morphing into their young selves.
That whole gambit comes to a head after Frank's health scare, when he has a revelatory dream where his kids (as kids)
tell them all the supposed secrets they've been keeping from him.
Everybody's Fine's major issue is simply that, like Frank himself, it treads territory that has been too often
traveled before. There's no denying the emotional impact the film finally manages to deliver, but it's a manufactured
manipulation that only serves to point out how cobbled together large swaths of
Everybody's Fine feels. The
sanguine acceptance of the Goode family's various peccadilloes may make for a feel good ending but it robs the film of
the sort of nuance that might have made it seem like anything other than the latest quasi-holiday based made for
television movie.
