Movie Review:  Everybody’s Fine

Two noncommercial movie serieses are coming through over the next week, one of which managed to start last week without my notice. There is a new series of movies from the French New Wave back the Sixties or so that did so much to open up the international movie scene to new methods and themes. This week's offering is Les Bonnes Femmes, don't hold me responsible for pronunciation, by Claude Chabrol, who is often compared to Hitchcock, Les Bonnes Femmes is about four Paris working girls who look for love and find murder, but it's supposedly more about the girls than the murder. Showing is Saturday at 7:30 in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway. And of course, on Sunday at 7:30 the Blank Page gallery comes through with another of its series of movies usually unknown to me but always always worth my while, this time with Parpaillon, also French but from 1995, a comedy about a bicycle competition - the Blank Page features bicycle movies and they're always fun.

And commercially, we have Everybody's Fine, with Robert De Niro, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, and Drew Barrymore, which is neither as good as the Eagle rated it not as bad as Entertainment Weekly did.

The biggest problem is character played by De Niro - not the performance, which is fine, but the character as conceived by writer-director Kirk Jones. Decades ago, either Ann Landers or Abigail Van Buren said that ever since the invention of the telephone, the old custom of the drop-in visit had been outmoded, and I don't see why anybody does it any more. Yet De Niro persists in crossing the continent to drop in by surprise on his children; he won't quit even when a pattern of unsatisfactory experiences should warn him how fatally foolish this practice is. There are hints that his motive is that his children are trying to avoid him, and there are reasons for us to suspect that maybe they are; but it isn't at all clear that De Niro suspects this, and he definitely is not a man who learns by experience. His people skills seem to be very slight, especially when he fails to notice that daughter Drew Barrymore is actually glad to see him; at least, she puts on a better show then Beckinsale or Rockwell. There was also a question in my mind as to why he couldn't renew his prescription when he was out of town: there was a reason given, but I couldn't see why anybody would allow such a limitation on something as important as medicine. He's fairly dull company, too, if a conversation on a train is any indication. And we get clear indications that he ws one of those men who has to be listened to because he can't be talked to; that pattern persists even in his dreams of family reunion near the very end. It's hard to sympathize with the self-induced problems of a person like that.

The other characters aren't particularly interesting, either, despite good work by all the cast. There is a touch of mystery, but you'll guess the solution long before you should. And there are touches of pure corn, such as the forsaken De Niro sitting on a stoop and looking at some nesting birds in the eaves above.

Still, there is first-rate acting here and a lesson I wish my parents had learned, and which I suspect a great many parents need to learn. Everybody's Fine is deeply flawed, but there is reality at the core, and you may be able to manage more empathy with an erring parent than I could.