After seeing “Everybody’s Fine,” Paul McCartney of fered to write a song that plays over the closing cred its. That may be because the whole movie is like a celluloid McCartney tune: warm and playful and sweetly earnest, but lightly funny, too, and crafted with consummate skill.
Robert De Niro gives a nicely muted performance as a recently widowed father of adult children who is proudly bustling around the house to prepare a holiday welcome for all the kids. None of them is coming, though, and none is telling him everything they’re worried about.
Forbidden to fly for medical reasons, Frank (De Niro) gamely decides to pay a surprise visit to each child in turn, booking passage around the country on a series of trains and buses. One daughter (Kate Beckinsale) is a busy ad executive in Chicago; a son (Sam Rockwell) a successful classical musician in Denver; the other daughter (Drew Barrymore) a dancer who works in Las Vegas.
(Sharp-eyed Connecticut residents will note with pride or shock that, no matter where De Niro goes, he always seems to be in the Nutmeg State, where most of the movie was filmed. I particularly enjoyed the way Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book Library in New Haven gets plunked down in Denver.)
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In part, “Everybody’s Fine” is deadpan travelogue, a slightly off-center celebration of Americanism (written and directed by a Brit, Kirk Jones, who based his script on a 1990 Italian movie) that could have been devised by a more well-adjusted Alexander Payne. In part, it’s a cunningly engineered mystery with an unlikely detective who, like many more illustrious predecessors, doesn’t seem to notice anything but rarely misses a detail.
It’s also, and chiefly, a sentimental holiday-season wish that we could all be more tightly bonded with our families, with a good-natured yet rueful eye for the many ways parents can be clueless stiffs and children careless ingrates.
Dangerous territory: Jones is taking a stroll around a lake of goo, and some viewers may find the film overly promiscuous with its emotions, particularly in the final act. To me, the movie tickles the tear ducts rather than mauls them, and I admired the stealthiness with which Jones builds to a climax, content to let De Niro relax and soak up screen time by, for instance, negotiating to buy a grill, getting schooled in golf by his grandson or explaining the pride he takes with every glance at a telephone pole.
Each little touch makes the old man that much more endearing. At the same time, his children have a legitimate beef in being annoyed by his uninvited disruption of their busy schedules.
This makes the film an excellent choice — there are fewer of these than there should be — for grown kids to watch with their parents around this time of year. As Frank totes his lonely bag around the country, determined to physically close huge gaps of distance while more frustrating ones of time and knowledge await, his quest is both achingly small and unconquerably large. Many a busted family will see their troubles reflected in his sad but hopeful face.