Directed by Kirk Jones
(PG-13)
**
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A father sets off on a journey to visit his grown children.
“There isn’t much that’s fine in Everybody’s Fine,” said Kirk Honeycutt in The Hollywood Reporter. In this Americanized version of a bittersweet film by Italian filmmaker Giuseppe Tornatore, Robert De Niro portrays a widowed father who sets off on a cross-country trip to visit his estranged children (Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore, and Kate Beckinsale). British director Kirk Jones, hired to lead us on this American adventure, does little to counteract the schmaltzy script’s lack of authenticity. Not a moment of the film rings true, said Nathan Rabin in The Onion. Everybody’s Fine plays like a “homogenized, Hallmark Channel version of About Schmidt”—except that, instead of Jack Nicholson, we have a “neutered” De Niro doddering around the nation. De Niro’s subtle comic performance is actually the saving grace of the film, said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. In too many films, De Niro plays a cartoon. Here he gives a touching portrayal of a man who’s become a foreigner in his own family, taking us on a voyage of self-discovery that is both “achingly small and unconquerably large.”
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