Everybody’s Fine

Tell me that Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore and Sam Rockwell are in a movie together and you can consider me excited. Sorry, Kate Beckinsale but I still haven’t totally forgotten Van Helsing yet to put you in the same company. One would think that all of them together would lead to some phenomenal. Perhaps that’s a little too much hype. Okay, I’d settle for really good. As it turns out, Kirk Jones’ Everybody’s Fine is simply a film with a few inspired moments – mostly towards the end – sprinkled in with a whole lot of awkward, even mean, portions. The result is a major disappointment.

Recently widowed Frank Goode (De Niro) is excited about the prospect of having all four of his children back around the dinner table for a reunion of sorts. When all of them bail, Frank sets out on a cross-country road trip to surprise each of them and reconnect individually. They continue to make excuses, hide major portions of their lives and pass Frank off from one sibling to the next.

I couldn’t help but sense an awkwardness that went beyond the withdrawn family dynamic between Frank and his children. The cast, which on the surface one would think would be one of the film’s major strengths, shows little chemistry. Okay, De Niro shows little chemistry with the rest of the cast might be more appropriate since he meets up with each of the three on separate occasions. While there’s meant to be a distance between Frank and his kids, the way it’s presented is almost cruel. The kids talk a lot about the past and why they’re so estranged with their father but little is shown to support this. In fact, in the film all we see is Frank as an aging teddy bear who simply wants to see his family and reconnect. So when his kids are constantly talking on the phone behind his back, passing him off from one to the other and withholding important family information, it comes across as being cruel.

Despite many of my misgivings for the film, there are some touching moments, particularly in the end. But this is when Jones finally starts showing rather than using excessive dialogue. Phone lines are used frequently in the film. They have a double meaning. They’re a symbol of Frank, as he used to put them up. The phone lines were what enabled his children to follow their life paths as Frank’s hard work and paychecks paid for them. The lines are also a device with which the siblings can chat with each other. Their voiceovers frequently occur while Frank is traveling between cities. It’s an easy way to get information across but it felt very contrived as well.

But contrived is what a lot of the film is. It’s very obvious watching it that it’s trying really, really, really hard to be touching, heart-felt and whatever other descriptors one might want to use to describe melting emotions. However somewhere along the way, the contrived nature exposes Everybody’s Fine to be anything but fine.

Everybody’s Fine DVD Review

Everybody’s Fine comes to DVD with a somewhat thin collection of features. The film is shown in enhanced widescreen (2.40:1 aspect ratio) with Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround English audio. There’s also an option Spanish track and subtitles in English, French and Spanish. Bonus features include three extended scenes, four deleted scenes and a making-of featurette for Paul McCartney’s “(I Want To) Come Home.”