6.8 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
A widower who realized his only connection to his family was through his wife sets off on an impromptu road trip to reunite with each of his grown children.
Starring: Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, James FrainComedy | Insignificant |
Adventure | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
English, English SDH, Spanish
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Everybody’s Fine is ostensibly a remake of a 1990 Italian film entitled Stanno tutti bene which starred Marcello Mastroianni (and which was director Giuseppe Tornatore's follow up to Cinema Paradiso), but there’s more than a whiff of the Jack Nicholson film About Schmidt wafting through this film’s premise and execution. Much like Alexander Payne’s 2002 wryly disheveled comedy, Everybody’s Fine posits a recent widower, in this case Frank Goode (Robert De Niro), who sets out on a cross country tour to reconnect with his children. If the Nicholson film couched its inherent melancholy with a liberal dose of curmudgeonly humor, Everybody’s Fine instead frames Frank’s trek as a sort of very special Hallmark Christmas made for television movie. There’s nothing in Everybody’s Fine that you haven’t seen a hundred (maybe a thousand) times before: a well meaning but emotionally tamped down father, adult children struggling with their own issues, and a family dynamic that could only charitably be called dysfunctional, but the film is anchored by a heartfelt, if slightly uncharacteristic, turn by De Niro, who (like Jack Nicholson) seems to be unable to really escape his own persona in films as he grows older. The character of Frank is an interesting, if often seen, one: an aging retiree who has tried to do “the right thing” his whole life, but who has spent so much time chasing The American Dream he’s let real human connections slip through his fingers. The film casts this all with a really ridiculously literal metaphor—Frank’s career has been coating telephone wires with PVC, something that has left his health in a precarious state of affairs, but which presents director Kirk Jones ample opportunity to interject long, lingering shots of telephone wires, an obvious reference to long distance communication. The irony here is that the Goode family seems to have been talking via cell phones with not very good service, repeatedly asking each other “Can you hear me now?”
Everybody's Fine is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This is a very nicely sharp and well detailed looking high definition presentation that only suffers from a couple of very minor niggling issues. The film incorporates some lovely establishing shots that take us across the country, as well as lots of brief snippets of Frank traveling by train, truck and, finally, plane. Color and contrast are very strong, and fine object detail pops quite brilliantly throughout the film. It isn't completely clear whether the problem issues are stock footage or not, but a couple of nighttime shots suffer from video noise which swarms over the image like hordes of little bugs. Other than these fleeting anomalies, though, the transfer is lovely and artifact free.
Everybody's Fine's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix only fully comes alive in a couple of musical moments (including Paul McCartney's song which plays over the closing credits), but that's not to say there isn't regular surround activity. There is, it's just incredibly subtle at times. The opening scenes establishing Frank's home life offer some faint discrete ambient environmental sounds populating the side and rear channels, and there are some nice, more obvious, moments once Frank starts traveling across country. Dialogue is very cleanly presented and the track, while not especially overwhelming in terms of "wow" immersive moments, quite ably creates a very realistic soundstage on which this action unfolds.
Everybody's Fine will most likely leave most viewers with a lump in their collective throats, but it's still an awfully prefabricated entertainment that works almost in spite of itself. De Niro is excellent as Frank, but the film takes a too literal approach sometimes that beats the audience over its figurative head rather than nudging viewers along into a gentler understanding of this dysfunctional family. The other putative "co-stars" are pretty much window dressing; this is De Niro's show, pure and simple, and the other characters are rather minor satellites swirling around his star. This is a middling entry in the De Niro filmography, but as is usually the case, he's an extremely watchable commodity and helps to elevate Everybody's Fine at least slightly above its generic made for television feel.
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