Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Everybody's Fine Blu-ray Movie Review

About Goode.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 17, 2012

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?”

We get a quick snapshot of Frank’s life right off the bat. This is a man who probably measures his lawn to make sure each blade of grass is the same height. Everything is in its place, his house is perfectly, almost pristinely, clean and order is apparent in every jot and tittle of his life. But obviously everything is not as it seems. It becomes clear that Frank is reeling from the recent death of his wife, and his emotional life is further set into turmoil when one by one his children, who have promised to come visit him, all phone to tell him they can’t make it. Despite warnings from his doctor that his health could be compromised by travel, Frank decides if his “Mohammedan” children won’t come to his mountain, the mountain will in fact travel to them.

The film then ping pongs between travel sequences, where we get little snippets that reveal Frank’s character, a kind of blustering but well meaning man who is obviously proud of his accomplishments and perhaps even his children, but is probably too pushy about it all, and the actual interactions with three of his four children. The fourth is son David, who turns out not to be at his New York City apartment when Frank shows up unannounced, and whose disappearance turns out to be a major (and fairly melodramatic) plot point.

Frank’s other kids do turn out to be there when Frank arrives, though they are obviously not very happy to see him. First up is advertising executive Amy (Kate Beckinsale), one of those glamorous professionals who lives in an impossibly chic home and whose office is similarly over the top. Amy’s home life seems to be reasonably intact, except that her son (Lucian Maizel) is obviously nursing some resentment toward his father (Damian Young). Amy makes several excuses as to why Frank can’t stay there, and so he decides to set off to visit his son Robert (Sam Rockwell), who is supposedly a top conductor. When he gets there, it turns out Robert is not exactly a conductor, and in fact is even questioning his somewhat tenuous life as a professional musician. Robert, like Amy, tells his father he is too busy to visit, and so Frank sets off to visit his last child, daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore), a dancer working in Las Vegas. In the meantime Frank has a violent interchange with a street kid sleeping in the train station, losing his medication in the scuffle.

Much like Amy, Rosie seems to be living an impossibly successful life, meeting her father in a stretch limousine and then taking her father to her impossibly gorgeous penthouse apartment. When a friend drops off a baby for the pair to take care of, and Frank overhears a message being left on the machine, he begins to discern that not everything is as picture perfect as Rosie has made it out to be. Without his pills and sensing that he’s unwanted by all of his children, Frank makes the disastrous decision to fly back home, despite his doctor’s previous warning that flying should be completely off limits due to Frank’s heart and lung problems.

That sets the film off into its maudlin but predictably emotionally wrenching finale, where Frank’s ill health finally brings his children together and forces them to reveal the truth about David. Part of what undercuts the film’s effectiveness, however, is the same literalness that is part and parcel of the ubiquitous shots of telephone wires. Every time Frank looks at one of his now grown kids, we see things through his eyes, with his children morphing into their young selves. That whole gambit comes to a head after Frank’s health scare, when he has a revelatory dream where his kids (as kids) tell them all the supposed secrets they’ve been keeping from him.

Everybody’s Fine’s major issue is simply that, like Frank himself, it treads territory that has been too often traveled before. There’s no denying the emotional impact the film finally manages to deliver, but it’s a manufactured manipulation that only serves to point out how cobbled together large swaths of Everybody’s Fine feels. The sanguine acceptance of the Goode family’s various peccadilloes may make for a feel good ending but it robs the film of the sort of nuance that might have made it seem like anything other than the latest quasi-holiday based made for television movie.

Everybody's Fine Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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 Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted and Extended Scenes (HD; 11:55) with timecode captions running underneath the image.


• The Making of Paul McCartney's "(I Want to) Come Home" (HD; 9:49) is a fun look at McCartney's contribution. He's quite funny when he talks about seeing a screening where the director had interpolated a temp track of Aretha Franklin singing "Let It Be".

Everybody's Fine Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

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.