If one were to stop and take a long look at the poster before going into see this movie, with its family portrait of Pater De Niro and his grown brood, all smiles and holiday cheer, Christmas tree looming in the background, one would surely expect to be in store for a quaint, homespun holiday family drama/comedy - something that is inevitably sweet and heartwarming. And if that were indeed the case, one would be dead wrong. What one gets instead is something much more Chekovian. Sounds good, right? Sounds like a marked improvement over the predictably dripping sentiment that the film's poster beams forth from theater windows, doesn't it? Wrong again!
At its best, Everybody's Fine, as Chekovian as it wants to be, never reaches the state needed to be truly considered Chekovian. It is merely low-rent Chekov, or, if you will, a sort of spiritual retooling of Ozu's Tokyo Story, as told by a dime-store Ibsen. Actually, I would be totally surprised to learn of Chekov (or Ibsen) ever being thought of while making this movie, but nonetheless, this seemingly warm-spirited family dramedy (at least, according to the imagery in the poster...and the trailer) plays out more like the aforementioned brooding playwright than any holiday family fare I've ever seen. Too bad it never equals such a pedigree, but instead only ends up a failure, no matter what perspective one takes. Whatever the case, sappy holiday pap or icy, pseudo-European melodrama, one surely doesn't get what one expects.
What one does get is family patriarch Robert De Niro quietly mourning the death of his wife. A distant, brooding figure (ala Chekov), De Niro's soft-spoken father, realizing he has never truly connected with his children (it was always mom who kept this family unit intact), schleps across the country to make surprise visits to each one of them. At times tragic, at times darkly humorous, at times suffocating, there are the rare moments of cinematic clarity - mainly when De Niro is center stage (the other three stars, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore, make for about 2 1/2 good actors between them, all with less-than-stellar roles to work with). But even these moments are not enough to make up for this maudlin, empty vessel, the Hallmark Channel of a motion picture that Everybody's Fine turns out to be.
I suppose in the end, we should just be happy that De Niro is not playing at bathroom humor with Ben Stiller and the gang, and just leave it at that. Still, when one contemplates how far the man who once embodied Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, Rupert Pupkin, and the young Vito Corleone has fallen, it staggers the mind and makes one think that, no matter how the title reads, everybody is certainly not fine.
Kevyn Knox is a film historian and critic. His reviews can be read at www.thecinematheque.com. He is a regular contributor to Film International and Plume-Noire and is the regular film columnist for a local alternative monthly called The Burg. He is also the cinema director of Midtown Cinema in his hometown of Harrisburg, PA, and has sat on the jury of the Harrisburg Film Festival every year since 2004. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled, Wild Bill: The Life, Times & Films of William A. Wellman.