For most of “Everybody’s Fine” you just kind of go along with the ride. In this “About Schmidt”-y drama (a remake of an Italian movie from 1990 with the same shitty name), Robert De Niro plays a recently widowed man who, unable to convince his grown children (Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell, and Kate Beckinsale) to come home for the holidays, decides to go visit them one by one. Since he’s unable to fly (due to a medical condition), he travels by train, bus, and in a weird scene, hitchhikes (Melissa Leo, of all people, picks him up).
The movie has an amiable, ambling pace, and it should be said that Robert De Niro gives his best performance in a long, long time. The supporting players do their best with their little nuggets of screen time, although nobody makes a terribly huge impression. There’s a nice device wherein we listen to characters’ communicating via long shots of telephone lines (Robert De Niro’s character made the installation for the line before he retired). It’s a nice device and gets information across in a succinct, emotionally sound way but how many of these phone calls would have been made on cell phones, utilizing satellite dishes and invisible waves?
It’s just that there’s a calamitously horrible decision made on the part of writer-director Kirk Jones (who we’ve met and isn’t a disagreeable guy at all) that ruins the entire movie and leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth for the remainder of the film. When we saw the film there was an audible sigh, like the room full of critics had just been exasperated by this moment to the point of no return.
There are warning signs of the trouble that lay ahead, interspersed throughout the film. For instance, in the scene when he goes to visit Kate Beckinsale, he sees her out in the backyard talking on the phone. As she nears the house, she slips out of view and when she slips back into view, it’s not Kate Beckinsale anymore but a tiny child version of Kate Beckinsale. She rounds another corner, and Beckinsale pops back up. It’s the kind of cloyingly manipulative bullshit that, while peppered throughout the movie, doesn’t take you out of the narrative long enough to derail you.
But then it happens. And by “it” we mean the climax. So if you’re skittish about spoilers or want the emotional centerpiece of this, the feel good movie of the Christmas season (that your mom will undoubtedly love), then go ahead and skip this next paragraph. For anyone else who wants to know about the most boneheaded climax in recent memory (and this includes the giant robot eating a pyramid from “Transformers 2”), please, read on.
So at some point in the movie some drifter destroys Robert De Niro’s heart medication. It’s an awful scene, one that was shot in the lower depths of the New Haven, Connecticut train station, but it wasn’t ruinous. We expect these kind of emotional spikes in movies like this. Soon enough, though, De Niro has a heart attack. And in this dreamy netherworld between life and death, he is seated at a picnic table with the CHILD VERSIONS OF ALL OF HIS GROWN CHILDREN. What’s more – they tell him information that he couldn’t have possibly known, and engage him in conversation that is supposed to be the emotional culmination of this entire movie. Let me restate – the emotional culmination of this movie, about a lonely man’s quest to reconnect with his children, is Robert De Niro. At a picnic table. With a bunch of little kids. It’s laughably absurd.
EThis sequence is so awful, in fact, that whatever glimmer of charm or emotional truth that the movie had, is completely blown out of the window. Instead, this is followed by an even worse moment that’s supposed to be really deep and powerful (it isn’t) and then becomes this wacky, feel good family Christmas movie that we’ve seen a thousand times before. The movie falls off a nosedive that it never recovers from. And what would have been a so-so little movie is left as a disingenuous mess. You don’t have to be cynical to understand how awful this movie truly is. [D] — Drew Taylor
