Kirk Jones, Miramax (26/02/10)

Robert De Niro used to frighten me. Not that he used to drop by my house and shout threats through the letter box or anything of that nature. What I mean is I found his performances scary. This was not only the case when he played obvious nutters like Travis Bickle in -Taxi Driver or Max Cady in Cape Fear. Even when he played relatively good guys in films such as Midnight Run or Backdraft he gave off a vibe which suggested that he might, at any moment, reach into the chest of one of his co-stars and rip out their still-beating heart. He seemed genuinely dangerous; capable of anything and everything.

Imagine my surprise to find that in Everybody’s Fine he has come over all soft and cuddly. Only once in his latest performance, during an encounter with a mugger, do we see a flash of the old De Niro steel. In this amiable but unremarkable film he plays an ‘every dad’ figure named Frank Goode. Both retired and widowed Frank spends his days like pretty much any parent in that situation. He potters around the garden in casual clothing, searches for bargains in the local supermarket and waits expectantly for his grown-up children to call.

What Frank has failed to realise, and I imagine this is true in a lot of instances, is that his kids’ lives no longer revolve solely around him. They have scattered themselves across America in pursuit of their careers and created families of their own. Frank’s children are a creative brood with jobs encompassing painting, music, dance and advertising. Frank’s genes, or possibly his late wife’s, must be magnificent. If he lived in the UK he could probably get a government culture grant to sire a few more talented progeny.

Despite all the money and time the Goode parents have lavished on their children, they are ungrateful swine who rarely call or visit. When all four of them make separate excuses not to attend a family barbecue Frank takes matters into his own hands. Ignoring the advice of his doctor (alarm bells ringing there) he sets off across the country to visit each of his offspring in turn.

The road trip gets off to a bad start when he reaches New York to see his artist son David (Austin Lysy) only to find that the boy has vanished. He leaves a note and moves on to the rest of his family in Chicago, Denver and finally Las Vegas. With each new encounter he becomes increasingly suspicious that not everything in the Goode family garden is as rosy as he was led to believe. The kids all seem to be hiding something and conspiring together to conceal the truth from their dear old dad. It is only when fate plays a potentially tragic hand that both we and Frank discover exactly what that truth is.

There is a nice sense of irony at the centre of the film. Frank Goode has spent his life working in a factory to support his family where he coated telegraph wires with protective chemicals. He is happy to tell anyone he meets about how he has helped America communicate. Despite this, he has always had problems talking to his children so that when it comes to important family developments he has been kept mainly in the dark. “ You always told your mother everything,” he complains, “and you don’t tell me anything.”

Everybody’s Fine jaunts along and is a pleasant enough watch but there is nothing outstanding here. An hour and forty minutes in the company of daddy De Niro and the likeable, talented actors who play his children slips by easily enough. The famous faces appearing as the Goode siblings are Kate Beckinsale, belying her English roots by sporting a dazzling LA suntan, the brilliant Sam Rockwell and the considerably charming Drew Barrymore. It is a pity that their roles are little more than extended cameos, with each taking their turn in the limelight when Frank turns up on their doorstep. They all come together for a final scene encore but you somehow feel that they possibly fitted their roles in during breaks in other, bigger projects. DeNiro, even in second gear, is still worth your time although there is nothing in the role that really stretches him.

Everybody’s Fine is a remake of the Italian film Stanno Tutti Bene but it is also reminiscent of About Schmidt, a film in which Jack Nicholson’s title character also came to terms with retirement, bereavement and family issues by going on a road trip. This new film is lacking that earlier movie’s delicious black humour and when it comes to handling sentimentality piles it on thick instead of using the more subtle approach of the Nicholson film. The finale of Everybody’s Fine is especially mawkish with a hospital bedside scene which tries to dictate how the audience should feel through the use of intrusive orchestral music instead of just letting them decide for themselves. These closing moments meander on long after they have made their point.

Directing duties on Everybody’s Fine belong to Kirk Jones who, just over ten years ago, created the whimsical sleeper hit Waking Ned before later scoring a huge commercial hit with Nanny McPhee. His latest venture is not a patch on those two and feels less a labour of love for the director and more like just plain labour. Everybody’s Fine is, indeed, fine but little more than that.

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