Los Angeles Times: Movie Review - 'Everybody's Fine'

By Michael Phillips
New York Times
Excerpt
December 4, 2009

"Relief" is the word for it. It's a relief to see Robert De Niro giving an honest, effective starring performance in a project that does not stink and that, in fact, rises to a respectable level of filmmaking proficiency. How long has it been?

"Everybody's Fine" may be as calculated a commercial product as the "Meet the Parents" and "Meet the Fockers" comedies (No. 3 to come next year), in which De Niro's comic skills were stretched into cartoon broadness. But this Americanized remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's 1990 "Stanno Tutti Bene" is gracefully acted by a very good cast headed by De Niro, relaxing into a comfortable pair of shoes originally worn by Marcello Mastroianni.

In the original, Mastroianni portrayed a Sicilian pensioner on a journey to visit his grown offspring, all of whom harbored secrets. The outline and various details of the original script remain in writer-director Kirk Jones' Americanized adaptation. (Jones himself is English.) Frank Goode, a retired wire factory worker and recent widower, invites his four adult children to the upstate New York homestead for the holidays. One by one they stiff his invite, offering wobbly excuses by phone about work and vague details regarding the whereabouts of their vagabond New York City artist sibling, David...

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