Everybody’s Fine (**½)

Directed by: Kirk Jones

Starring: Robert De Niro, Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell

Seen: March 14^th 2010

**½ Out of ****

Frank Goode (De Niro) is living on his own and Everybody’s Fine starts with him cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, setting up the inflatable pool, simply put; making sure everything is perfect. But then the calls start coming in, everybody’s letting Frank know they won’t be able to make it this weekend for some reason or the other. If it was any other weekend, they’d still be there, but not this weekend. So Frank starts packing – if they won’t come to him, he’ll go to them. He clears it with his doctor (well, sort of), and he’s off, travelling by rail and bus.

En route he tells people about his career, manufacturing PVC covered cables, used in telephone lines, wondering how much happiness and/or sadness they carry as the lines rise and fall right outside the windows. His first visit is to his son David, the artist, but he isn’t not home so Frank only leaves a note. Next is Amy (Beckinsale), who claimed they cannot make it since her son Jack is sick, but as Frank arrives he finds that Jack is fine and Amy quickly resorts to calling it a 24-hour bug. Amy is on the phone every now and then, and when her husband arrives they allude to being too busy, so Frank can only stay the night. Frank leaves for Denver to See Robert (Rockwell), who is not an orchestra conductor as he had thought, but a percussionist. Robert, like Amy, is friendly, but avoids a stay-over for Frank using the orchestra going to Europe that night as an excuse. This has Frank head right on to his next destination, Las Vegas, where his youngest daughter, Rosie (Barrymore), is an entertainer. She picks him up in a stretch limousine and takes him to her incredibly spacious apartment, but before long Frank decides to head on home and he does not even spend the night.

All of the visits are however tinged with sadness, as the viewer cannot help but sense an embellishment of truth, or at the very lest a liberal application of it. Frank also realises this, if only subconsciously at first, and this is the reason for his speedy departure from Rosie’s. Flying home from Las Vegas, Frank gets anxious on the plane, and suffers a heart attack which ushers in a dream sequence in which all the discomfort of Frank’s children gets explained and this is where the movie takes a rather depressing turn.

Everybody’s Fine is a low-profile social commentary on how people tend to lock their parents out of their lives, and how desperately these parents want to know their children are doing well. It speaks to the responsibility children feel to make their parents proud, and if they can’t do that, how they’d almost rather disappear than disappoint. A light-hearted story becomes quite heavy quite quickly, and Robert De Niro manages to carry this responsibility with great success; this is the same guy who terrorised people in some of his old movies, but here he shines as the fragile father searching for a meaningful connection with his children. Everybody’s Fine does get a tad sentimental at times, and this is most evident in the closing scenes of the movie. It is slightly sad to see that even though we’re not, we like to hear that Everybody’s Fine.