Everybody's Fine

The best movies help you discover yourself, or make you forget yourself altogether for a while.

In Everybody's Fine Robert De Niro gives a subtle performance about a sledgehammer of a man, Frank Goode, who has made his living laying miles of telephone cable wire and comes to the end of his life realizing his own kids are avoiding him and covering up the truth of their lives and his. His wife has died and he lives in a seventies museum of a house, filling his days with yardwork and an antiquated answering machine that exists only to receive the blinking light of their excuses and evasive distance. The photos of his wife and children are enshrined on the mantle and in the hallways. His doctor warns him not to travel, especially by plane.

De Niro, who has played a taxi driver and a deer hunter and a raging bull, who has embodied The Godfather and The Devil and The King of Comedy, wears a sad clown face as the stubborn, determined, loving but inarticulate father who steadily learns the regret of realizing his brand of love, the tough discipline and high expectations and dogged provision, never met the needs of his scattered brood. With the same dogged determination he laid his miles of wire he sets out to rediscover them and deliver an envelope to each one of them, the contents of which we never see until late in the story. He packs one outdated suitcase and sets out to surprise them, dropping in on their hectic lives. Dad, what are you doing here? they ask. He wants to be with them. He wants them to come home and be together for the holidays. He wants to know everybody's fine.

The seminal moment in the movie comes when he goes to his wife's headstone to apologize to her. He realizes he made mistakes and his amends were clumsy and inept. The envelopes he has left under the door and on the kettle drum and thrust into his daughters' hands weren't enough to bridge the awful gap of time and misplaced hope in their lives. The kids are keeping terrible secrets. Their brother is in deep trouble in Mexico, and worse yet, they don't want to be alone with him again. They can't bear the awkwardness. They can't bear his expectations and needy interest. They're too busy with their own lives, the truth of which would be a searing disappointment to him and themselves. They go to elaborate lengths to conceal the mess they've made, to keep his inquiries at bay and send him along to the next sibling. The wires he laid across America become a network they use to control their interactions with him and protect their secrets. Both he and his kids see their strained relationship as a sad duty to his dead wife and their mother. At one point in the story he says as a father of four he expected to worry. The children show by their reluctance and vagueness that as the children of Frank Goode they expected to be a disappointment to him. They hide their sorrows and even their loves.

De Niro's odyssey across America takes him to New York and Chicago and Las Vegas on trains and buses, and his chance encounters with tender, lost, dangerous, gentle, odd, helpful people show his humanity and theirs. It's telling how much more readily he connects with strangers. One old man at the counter of a diner gives him a sad glimpse into his future.

Parents will see themselves in Frank Goode. When he meets each of his children and when he imagines them gathered around his table he sees them as the children they were coming toward him in their play clothes and with small vulnerable voices. It's a powerful device that will resonate with anyone who has ever worried over their adult child: you always see them as the bright, trusting child you parented imperfectly.

I admired the humanity and courage the actors displayed in creating this movie. Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale give nuanced performances that made me reflect on my own life and my own complicated journey as a parent and a child.

Both my parents were a mystery to me and I remember them with a mixture of gratitude and shame. My father was a brutal and inarticulate man with staggering limitations. His coarseness and cruelty scarred me deeply, but as the years passed he made gestures of reconciliation that amazed me. My mother could wound or heal and never leave a mark. It's hard to choose between remembering the sneering criticism or the noble sacrifices. It's hard to talk about either. As a parent myself I've tried break their vicious cycles and reject their divided legacies with mixed success: I was fiercely loving and devoted but breathtakingly preoccupied and undependable. My children knew I loved them, but whole years went by when they had no idea where I was or when they would see me again. My own unmanagable and misspent life got in the way of all my best intentions. I care so much for my kids. I failed them completely and over and over.

The movie was thoughtful and ambitious. It went unnoticed in the theaters and escaped critical attention. People will rent it and many will watch thinking not much happened and be disappointed. I thought it had layers of realism that could reach into your soul. I was stunned. It will stay with me for a long time.