Ripe, sentimental and surprisingly effective, it’s appropriate that Paul McCartney wrote the song that plays over the end credits of Everybody’s Fine. Like that artist, the film is old-fashioned and predictable, a rehashing of themes and motifs that have been more powerfully rendered in Tokyo Story and elsewhere.
Robert De Niro, putting in his most convincing, albeit sleepy performance in a decade, plays a lonely widower who visits his grown up children – Kate Beckinsale’s highflying advertising executive, Sam Rockwell’s percussionist, Drew Barrymore’s dancer – on an improvised road trip. All of them are too busy for dad and all of them are hiding things, including the whereabouts of their artist brother.
Writer-director Kirk ‘Nanny McPhee’ Jones adapts Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian drama into compellingly cheesy entertainment; the adult players are frequently transformed into the Children They Once Were and the big emotional denouement, however predictable, packs a punch.
The best bit? A scene towards the end when Mr. De Niro is standing in front of a poster for HP scribe Peter Murphy’s John the Revelator. Now that’s product placement we can live with