Everybody’s Fine (2009)

Remember the Bobby De Niro characters of old? The ones you’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to slip anything by? The ones that would kick your ass and dump you in a trunk faster than you could say “li’l bit”? Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

In Everybody’s Fine, De Niro plays recent widower Frank Goode. Frank is a blue-collar guy who’s worked hard to make a better life for his four children. After all of them, now adults, stand him up for a reunion dinner at his home in Elmira, NY, (poor guy, he bought a $600 grill, filet mignon, and everything) Frank decides that he’ll just go on a cross-country trip to see them.

Frank has to visit his doctor first, since he has an unspecified lung condition from years of working with the PVC piping that coats telephone lines. But even when he doesn’t get his physician’s seal of approval, he sets off on a train-and-bus trip carrying one bottle of medication in his little green suitcase, which he doesn’t realize rolls until he makes it all the way to Chicago.

The first stop is to see his eldest son, David, in New York City. There, Frank believes, David is a successful artist. But David never comes home to his run-down tenement apartment no matter how long Frank sits looking sad and vulnerable on the front steps. Slightly worried, but figuring his kid must be busy, Frank sets off west for Chicago by bus.

That’s where his daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale), a rich advertising executive, lives in her huge, ultramodern house. Much to her chagrin, she’s actually home when Frank arrives to surprise her. So she pawns him off on her teen son to entertain before passing him along like a hot potato to her other brother, Robert (Sam Rockwell).

Robert is at least a little more excited to see his dad, although he is ashamed to admit that he’s been lying to him. Instead of the big-time orchestra conductor that Frank believes him to be, Robert is a lowly drummer boy who’s just fine with that. It seems that he’d like a longer visit with his father, but as we learn through a clunky voiceover conversation with his sisters Amy and Rosie (with Frank’s beloved telephone poles as the backdrop), they’ve all got a bigger secret they’re keeping.

After a missed bus, a hitched ride from a friendly female truck driver, and a violent encounter with a junkie street kid, Frank arrives in Las Vegas to see his “dancer” daughter, Rosie (Drew Barrymore). Predictably, she’s keeping some secrets from poppa too.

Remember that lone bottle of pills and the junkie street kid? Thanks to them, Frank has a medical emergency that lands him in the hospital and into a cheesy dream sequence where he’s finally able to see what’s really going on. The kids all had a more open relationship with their mom but have only ever told Frank what they thought he wanted to hear.

Adapted from the 1990 Italian film Stano Tutti Bene by writer-director Kirk Jones, Everybody’s Fine is a throwaway piece of holiday schlock. As cinematic road trips go, the one Jones presents to audiences is thoroughly unadventurous and plodding. So too is the schmaltzy dialogue, which reaches its lamest depths in the latter parts of the film: the dream sequence, hospital room conversations with both living and dead family members, and syrupy-sweet ending.

That the old De Niro manages to poke through at all is a welcome surprise. In his tussle with the street kid, De Niro puts up the kind of tough guy fight we remember from his Raging Bull days. When he offers a glimpse of his own leg in response to a proposition from a NYC prostitute, he exhibits the unexpected and disarming humor that he’s gotten so good at in his later career. And watching the familiar De Niro half-manic smile creep across his face at the sight of the baby (whose could it be?) that Rosie looks after hints at the sort of actor he might be in his twilight years.

But these moments are frustratingly infrequent, leaving Frank (and sadly, De Niro) looking like the world’s most pathetic and naïve old dude for the bulk of the film. Everybody’s Fine is only fine if you’re a sentimental, easily snookered, old fool like Frank.

If you enjoyed this review, you may also be interested in the following:

• All About Steve
• Paper Heart
• The Ugly Truth