Everybody - But Not Everything - Is Fine

By Nathan Cone

Robert De Niro is one of the greatest actors of our time, but warm and fatherly he is not. That’s kind of the point of his role in Everybody’s Fine, but still I kept expecting him to whack one of his kids for keeping secrets from him.

Written and directed by Kirk Jones (Waking Ned Devine), Everybody’s Fine hits you over the head with its theme, the lack of communication between parents and children. De Niro plays a Frank Goode, a guy that made his living stringing telephone wires. See? They’re wires that carry all sorts of communication that he’s not having with his adult children. Wires that we see countless times throughout the film.  Following the death of his wife, Frank wants to get all the kids together for a family meal, but they’re either unreachable or unavailable. So he hops on a train to visit each one. Surprise!

Unfortunately for Frank, when he shows up in person, each of his adult children manages to make some flimsy excuse to avoid spending much time with him.  In reality, each of the kids is hiding from Frank that their lives are far from perfect. The successful advertising executive has a failing marriage, the musician is a percussionist in the symphony rather than the conductor (as Frank was led to believe), the dancer has a small part in a Vegas show, not the lead.  But there are far greater things these siblings are hiding from their father, too, like the fact that David, the one that Frank failed to connect with in person, is in serious trouble. And that the Vegas dancer has a young baby, officially making Frank, unbenownst to him, a grandfather to a child.

I can accept the fact that children want to make their lives look better for their parents, and I hope to be a good enough father to my own children that we’ll always be able to talk about things openly throughout our lives.  But when it comes to matters of life and death, why on earth would you still keep up a front to let your dad know “everybody’s fine?”

De Niro and the other leads in the film – Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, and Sam Rockwell, deliver fine performances. I could believe these characters as a family unit, especially the siblings, even though they spend little screen time together. But I couldn’t buy in to the story, which pushes those characters’ actions a little too far.

Everybody's Fine on DVD

The DVD of Everybody’s t Fine comes with some deleted and extended scenes from the film. There’s also a nine-minute interview/feature with Paul McCartney, who wrote the Golden Globe-nominated song “(I Want To) Come Home,” which plays over the end credits of the movie.

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