Susan Granger’s review of “Everybody’s Fine” (Miramax Films)
Robert De Niro plays a retired, recent widower, Frank Goode, trying to reconnect with his grown children in Kirk Jones’ remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Stanno Tutti Bene.”
Frank senses something’s amiss when he plans a summer barbeque and his children cancel, one after another, giving a variety of flimsy excuses. So despite dire warnings from his doctor, Frank decides to make a cross-country road trip, paying a surprise visit to each one of them. His first stop is in New York City, where he waits at his artist son David’s apartment, but David never shows up. He then goes to Chicago, where his advertising executive daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale) seems tense and uncomfortable in his presence. After that, his classical musician son Robert (Sam Rockwell) is just leaving Denver as Frank is arriving. And his dancer daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore) is saddled with a baby-sitting chore when he lands in Las Vegas. Though they all try to put up a good front, Frank knows that everything is not perfect in their lives – far from it.
“I don’t know what it is with you kids,” Frank plaintively complains. “You always told your mother everything, and you don’t tell me anything.”
During Frank’s journey, writer/director Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine,” “Nanny McPhee”) gradually reveals various secrets and regrets, the kind that run rampant in every family. Since Frank estimates that, working double shifts at a wire factory, he’s coated a million feet of telephone wire to get his kids where they are, Jones’ recurring visual motif of the telegraph pole-studded landscape and blurred voices is ironically illustrative of the problems Frank has had in communicating with his offspring.
Deliberately underplaying his disappointment, Robert De Niro is masterful in the redemptive role originated by Marcello Mastroianni. And since all of the film’s dramatic scenes were shot in and around Stamford, Connecticut residents will spot familiar locales. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Everybody’s Fine” is a poignant, if occasionally schmaltzy 7, a very touching family story, full of humor, heart and wisdom.
