Please note: If you’d like to leave a comment, double-click on the title above and a blank box will appear underneath the review. Thanks and happy holidays! Donna

I loved this film and believe everyone should see it. Especially young adults who are too busy to spend time with their parents during the holidays. Everybody’s Fine makes one realize how precious and valuable time is with our loved ones. And it makes one realize that it’s not doing anyone any favors to keep the truth from your parents. They can handle the truth. They just can’t handle the deceit.

Robert De Niro plays Frank, a retired blue-collar man who put PVC on telephone wires in a factory for a living. Recently widowed, he is lonely and bored with home repairs and gardening. The movie opens with him getting ready for his 4 grown children to come home for a family reunion. This involves buying groceries, wine, filet mignon, blowing up the swimming pool and other odds’n’ends that parents do when their adult children are coming home. You can tell he’s looking forward to this visit. He wants to impress them. It means everything to him. His kids haven’t been home since their mother’s funeral eight months before, but every single one cancels on him, saying they’re too busy. (It reminds me of life today, in general. Everyone is too busy to really spend time with their friends and family. I think it’s a worldwide epidemic.)  Frank is feeling disconnected — his wife held the family together — and so, against his doctor’s advice, he embarks on a cross-country road trip by bus to visit each one.

His children include: David, the artist who is now mysteriously absent from his Manhattan apartment; Amy (Kate Beckinsale), the Chicago ad exec who lives in an ultramodern Frank Lloyd Wright type of house; Robert (Sam Rockwell), a touring orchestra timpanist who Dad surprises in Denver; and Rosie (Drew Barrymore), a beautiful Vegas dancer who seems to be hiding something even though she appears to live in a gorgeous high-rise.

Frank knows right away that everyone is lying to him and that something is terribly amiss. The truth is – no one is fine or happy. The children skirt around the truth and leave their father feeling more frustrated than ever. What he finds is that his children aren’t doing as well as his wife had him believe — and they are reluctant to see this man who had such high expectations for them without the buffer of their mother. He thought Robert (Sam Rockwell) was a big-time conductor; instead, he’s a small-time percussionist. Amy (Kate Beckinsale) is doing well in her advertising career, but her family life is going down the toilet. Rosie (Drew Barrymore), ostensibly a lead dancer in a Las Vegas revue, has issues with both. And David is MIA, though his siblings know a lot more about his whereabouts than they’re letting on with their father.

Everybody’s Fine is a remake of the Italian film Stanno tutti bene, and is something of a departure for De Niro, who generally plays grittier roles. I think this film is a serious inquiry into how grown children treat their parents and how we as a whole treat the elderly. The movie depicts the children as quite selfish and self-centered and to be honest, I think it is very realistic of the way children are today.  

Robert De Niro is excellent in this role. He underplays it and in doing so, makes this one of his most interesting performances in years. His face wears the emotions of the movie and it will leave you in tears. The actors who play his children do a respectable job and Drew Barrymore is adorable in her role as Rosie.

Directed by Kirk Jones, Everybody’s Fine is written by Kirk Jones and Massimo De Rita.  I definitely recommend seeing this movie. It will make you appreciate your parents and family more than ever.