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| Another
happy reunion? (l-r) DeNiro and Barrymore in Everybody’s
Fine. |
Meet
the Children
By
Ann Morrow
Everybody’s
Fine
Directed
by Kirk Jones
‘I
want to be with you by Christmas,” says Frank Goode (Robert
DeNiro). No one answers, because he’s alone in his living
room. Frank has just returned from a long trip to visit each
of his four children, and the wish he expresses is a poignant
reminder of why he went on the trip. In Everybody’s Fine,
DeNiro plays a widowed, and much-mellowed blue-collar father
whose children are hiding a secret from him. The film has
fleeting moments of real emotion, most of them from DeNiro,
but director Kirk Jones’ adaptation of the 1991 Italian film
by Giuseppe Tornatore is more contrived than the original,
and it pounds down on a single theme for its entirety.
Frank’s first stop is to see his artist son, David, but David
isn’t at home, and isn’t answering his phone. Frank’s next
stop is with Amy (Kate Beckinsale), a successful ad exec who
is too busy to let Frank stay for more than a day. He then
travels to see his son Robert (Sam Rockwell), and is disappointed
to learn that Robert is not a symphony conductor, but a percussionist.
Robert also gives him short shrift, telling his father he
has to leave for a European tour. Frank’s daughter Rosie (Drew
Barrymore), a Vegas dancer, is more welcoming, inviting her
father to stay a few days in her palatial apartment, but Frank
senses that Rosie is not being truthful with him about her
living arrangements, and he leaves early.
What Frank learns from each of them is that they were so accustomed
to talking openly only with their mother, who taught them
to hide any problems from their father, that they can’t be
honest with him—especially about anything that might be a
diminishment of his ambitions for them. What Frank doesn’t
know is that their not-uncommon problems are not the worst
of what they’re not telling him. Frank reciprocates by understating
his own problems.
As he traverses the country by bus, train, and plane, Frank
has a variety of mostly clichéd encounters with other travelers.
It’s a treat to see DeNiro, 66, play an older—and rapidly
becoming wiser—father figure, but his laid-back persona can
carry the story only so far. The only familial sparks that
fly are between him and Rockwell, and, even more briefly,
a middle-age lady truck driver who gives him a lift and an
interlude of genuine empathy. The director’s sentimental device
of having Frank still see his children in his mind as they
used to be (when they actually were young children),
pays off with a mental encounter during which he confronts
each of them with the truth that he’s learned through observation
and parental intuition. The film’s happy ending—it is, after
all, a Christmas film—isn’t a sellout, considering the plot
begins with the kind of tragedy that often does bring a family
closer together, but by the end, some in the audience may
be wishing that that the tougher and funnier father DeNiro
played in Meet the Parents had made the trip instead.
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