Remember when De Niro’s name made you think of The Godfather and Taxi Driver instead of Meet the Fockers and Hide and Seek? Sigh...
By now, Robert De Niro’s status as the greatest living American actor has found its way into the company of Orson Welles’s status as a meteoric prodigy and Marlon Brando’s as a devil-may-care sex symbol. The myth might still live somewhere inside the husk that gets trotted out, but nothing seems able to recapture what’s been lost.
Everybody’s Fine, the latest from writer-director Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), seems like a clear attempt to recapture some of the ethos that De Niro has lost in tired genre pics (Righteous Kill) and hokey payday comedies (Meet the Fockers); it’s impossible not to see it as an acting showcase, with De Niro centre stage as a widower roaming the country visiting his estranged children. The film is a remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's Stanno Tutti Bene (1990), but a more contemporary parallel would be Jack Nicholson’s vulnerable turn in About Schmidt. But where About Schmidt followed a broken man through shades of grey across America, punctuating the drama with a clumsy absurdity and a naked Cathy Bates, Everybody’s Fine is melodramatic, humourless and trite. The score is always either soaring or plunging, but no volume of plaintive strings can save the film from its clumsy writing and directing, or from De Niro’s unrelenting stoicism.
As Frank, a recently widowed retiree roaming the country to reunite his scattered adult children (played by Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore) after yet another failed get-together, De Niro mostly mumbles his lines through a stoic façade that only breaks when it predictably shatters. Aside from a single Oscar-baiting crying jag in a hospital room (the movie is building to A Tragedy), his performance is so completely internal that it would take a microscope to see any texture. But in Jones’s writing and direction, he at least has a kindred spirit in one-note execution.
Telephone lines are metaphors for the lack of communication between Frank and his children, who exchange secrets behind his back. A distant storm serves as a completely unnecessary exclamation point on the family’s escalating problems. Every loose end is even tied up in an incongruous dream sequence where young versions of each child reveal, in full, the problems that were either so obvious that audiences will feel Jones is repeating himself, or so inscrutable that only this deus ex machina could have illuminated them.
In the Tornatore original, “everybody’s fine” is a statement dripping with the irony of a family’s hidden problems. Its American successor might have wiped this irony clean with an obligatory ham-fisted resolution and a few wet hankies, but at least it still drives home another irony: Everybody’s Fine is absolutely not.
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