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Everybody's Fine Review
23 Feb 2010
Critics rating: 3 stars out of 5
Reviewed by Tom Charity , LOVEFiLM
Everybody's Fine

It's what we tell friends and family for their own peace of mind: everybody's fine and there is nothing to worry about.

Sometimes it’s at least half true, but usually the reality is more complicated; “fine” is a comforter you can wrap around a whole mess of trouble. 

This is what Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) discovers rather late in life. Recently widowed, he’s hoping that his four grown children will visit him for Thanksgiving, along with their spouses and the grandkids. One by one, they all call off, and so he decides to defy doctor’s orders and surprise each of them in turn, embarking on a bus and train trip that will take him half way across the country.

Cast details

The first stop is New York, where his oldest son David is an artist. Frank finds no one home. Ah well, he turns west and shows up unannounced at Amy’s multi-million dollar dream house. An advertising executive, Amy (Kate Beckinsale) obviously doing well for herself, though his grandson Jack (Lucian Maisel) scoffs when Frank compliments him on his excellent school reports, and there is an undertow of tension in the house. Worse, they’re too busy to offer him hospitality for more than a night.

Undeterred, he looks forward to reconnecting with Robert (Sam Rockwell), an orchestra conductor, and Rosie (Drew Barrymore), a dancer.

Aren’t these creative high-achievers a little too good to be true? Well, maybe they are at that. As his journey progresses, he starts to see that his late wife sheltered him from the kind of news she thought he didn’t want to hear. 

A remake of a 1990 Marcello Mastroianni film of the same name by Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paradiso), Everybody’s Fine works well enough in an American context, even if we have to concede that Frank’s single-minded determination his kids shall become great artists is unusual in a blue collar dad.

I guess there are still sexagenarians who don’t carry cell phones and don’t keep tabs on their kids through social media, but it seems a little strange that such a proud and motivated parent wouldn’t follow his offspring’s achievements more closely in later life – that’s the return on his investment surely?

Robert De Niro and Drew Barrymore

Still, writer-director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned) gets a lot of the little things right – there’s a nice touch when Jack takes his grandfather’s case and automatically opens up the retractable handle the old man didn’t know was there, for instance, and another scene with the suitcase when Frank obliviously irritates an entire orchestra as he bumps it through an empty concert hall to watch his son rehearse.

De Niro seems more engaged by this role than he has for some time. It’s a quiet, dignified, unfussy performance – Frank is a good man who pushed too hard and then not enough. De Niro is arguably a little young and robust, but he unwraps the film’s comic gifts with subtle care, and he brings out the best in the rest of the cast. Rockwell, especially, makes the most of the brief scenes he’s granted.

This is the kind of middle-brow melodrama Hollywood isn't interested in making anymore.

In a sentimental conceit that comes straight from the Italian movie Frank sees his kids not just as they are, but as they were. It’s an affecting ploy until Jones overplays his hand in a dream sequence so loaded with revelation there’s no need for a psychiatric interpretation.

Manipulative it may be, and contrived, but there is some truth in it too. This is the kind of middle-brow melodrama those in the know keep saying Hollywood isn’t interested in making anymore.

Given that it was produced by Miramax, the Disney subsidiary that recently shed most of its staff and its British president Daniel Battsek, they’re probably right. You might want to pay your respects while you still can.

Everybody's Fine Reviews

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