The One with Everybody's Fine

Robert De Niro is one of the most amazing actors to date. He can do a dramatic scene like no one I know, and can be funny as heck. (You must be living in a cave if you haven't seen Ben Stiller's Meet the Parents, which had sequels like "Meet the Fockers" and another one that I forgot about...). 

And just like any good actor, you can really count on him to bring you into a role so convincingly that you will find yourself drawn to the character and forget that he was ever Robert De Niro or that he played Ben Stiller's less than cooperative father-in-law. 

Everybody's Fine is exactly that. It gives you a superbly dramatic but simple look on how a father deals with his everyday life when his children have all grown up. Frank is a simple guy that worked on wiring telephone connections for decades to put his children through school. David (played by Austin Lysy), his eldest son whom he thinks is a well-known artist in New York, Amy (played by Kate Beckinsale), his Ad Agency daughter whom he thinks has the picture-perfect family life, Robert (played by Sam Rockwell), whom he thinks is a conductor in an orchestra, and his youngest daughter Rosie (played by Drew Barrymore) who is a dancer. 

As he struggles to find out the truth about his eldest son, David who hasn't returned his calls, he sets off to visit each one of them, revealing little details about their lives that never occurred to him thanks to his wife, and his children's strong need to cover-up for their short-comings. It is revealed in each visit that he has missed particular chances to show them how proud he is of them and how they only wished they'd measure up to his extremely high standards. 

So goes an amazing story of how life is affected by communication. At the end of the story, Frank heads back to New York to purchase all of David's work. The lady in the store then unearths a beautiful painting of David of telephone wires, wires that Frank has built and has connected him to his family for decades and for more years to come. 

The movie is shot frame per frame without effects, not much sets, not much costume changes either. There is very little to almost no glamor in the shots they had for the movie, but they acted so beautifully that you can't help but cry so hard at the thought of a father losing his most beloved son. 

It tanked in the US and wasn't given much appreciation but it's actually one movie that allows you to see past the usual drama of Hollywood romances and lets you in on how it is to be in a family, which I think media shows less of. My theory is that it's a box-office bomb cos it didn't even have one kissing scene. While most TV series center themselves around families (Check out Modern Family, Two and a Half Men and even Gary Unmarried), they don't carry the social stigma of how children tend to want to protect their own parents from their misgivings. They also look at family in a hilarious, offbeat kind of way that becomes endearing. Families are sometimes gritty and sad, and here's one look at that sad yet poignant tale of how children rear their parents when they grow up.