Everybody's Fine

"But the Film? N'yeah, Not So Much!"

Widower Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has a big family reunion planned when all the kids at the last minute cancel. Assuming, as do we, that they're just avoiding seeing "the old man," he packs his bags, his keys and his pills, and buses and trains across the country to drop in, unannounced, on each and every one of them, with a mystery note. He doesn't fly, you see, as he's suffering from pulmonary fibrosis, which he's acquired from his job of weather-coating phone-cable with PCB's. It is the very nature of this movie to let no plot-detail go unutilized in this bubble-world of a movie, so, of course, that becomes important later.

When visiting each kid, he realizes that they're leading somewhat less successful lives than they and his late wife had led him to believe. And he's determined to get everybody back together for a big get-together at Christmas.

It sounds like the excellent Christmas "ABC Movie of the Week," "The Gathering," in which a dying Edward Asner attempts to have one last Christmas with all his estranged adult kids before he goes to the Great Gift Return in the Sky. But this is actually based on an Italian film by "Cinema Paradiso" director Giuseppe Tornatore called "Stanno Tutti Bene" (or "Everybody's Fine") and de-cultured, simplified, sweetened and topped by an ineffectual Paul McCartney song by Kirk Jones (who made "Waking Ned Devine" and "Nanny McPhee" and should know better).

I haven't seen the original (shame on me, I loved "Paradiso"), but I know it wasn't as slick and as simple-minded as this version. For example, it hinges on the false premise that nobody ever talks in this family...ever. The entire movie could have been solved in an hour by Dr. Phil. Everybody keeps secrets, sure. But usually not very well. How long did these kids think they could keep their charades going, especially with the major life-changes they entail? The machinations that daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore) has to go through are herculean and more than a little uncredible for what she's hiding, and also speak of a lack of feeling that the rest of her performance belies. Added to that, the plot device of inflating your importance to your parents has been used in every sit-com ever conceived—but pulling it off on an elaborate movie budget tends to make the concept explode like shrapnel. It's especially frustrating, after seeing a mature film for adults like "Up in the Air" to see froth like this, designed for the eye-candy-and-blue-hair crowd, where no opportunity for closure goes unachieved with an unsubtle slam.

The cast in uniformly great, howver. De Niro (man, he looks plasticized in that poster—they airbrushed out all his wrinkles to attract a younger crowd) schlumpfs around the country, asking, ironically, "Are you not talking to ME?" and still manages to find simple, interesting ways to be "a joe." The kids are played by Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale and Sam Rockwell*, who all do fine jobs given the paucity of material, though Rockwell looks particularly frustrated with his role.

Who could blame him? This isn't a film. It's a "project," gussied up with an all-star cast of available talent who have nothing in common other than they wanted to work with De Niro; a constuct that looks good on the surface, but has no underlying thought to it that would make it legitimate in its own right, and plausible as a story. It's "Meet the Fockers" done as drama, a collection of parts that don't fit for a coherent film, much less as a representation of real life. Everybody involved should be sentenced to a year of working in theater where they might stumble on some actual characters to play and thoughts to express. Their aspirations are too low, and need to be adjusted.

"Everybody's Fine" is a Cable-watcher, probably on "Lifetime."



* That's another thing: there's no way De Niro could have had these three kids without marrying three different wives. Nobody looks like they belong in the same family. It looked good on paper on the Miramax ledger-sheet, I'm sure, but it looks like sham on the screen.

Whip It

"Follow Your Blisster"

Drew Barrymore's first directorial effort "Whip It" is an odd little mixture of Afterschool Special and Grrl Power, seemingly contemporary but channelling the 70's. The titular "It" girl is played by Ellen Page, now riding the wave of "Juno." Her character, Bliss Cavender, is living a tractor-pull life in Bodeen, Texas, yanked on one hand by her letter carrier mother (Marcia Gay Harden) to follow in her sensibly-glam high heels on the beauty pageant circuit, or following the pull of the negatively glamorous life of a roller-derby queen in a D-circuit league in Austin.

Conflicts ensue. The one life is safe and conforming, the other is dangerous and compromises her home life to pursue it. But, Bliss rationalizes that life IS compromise and begins lying through her mouth-guard to achieve it.

It's easy to see why: Mom is a harpee chewing the cud of her glory-days, and Dad (Daniel Stern) is a good-natured lug who checks out to avoid conflict. Her school mates are cretins and her best buds' are her co-workers at the BBQ Joint with a dry-wall pig on the roof. "Are you being 'alternative' now?" asks a smarmy cheerleader (ex-friend) at her High School. "'Alternative' to what?" Bliss lamely asks. It's hardly Marlon Brando's challenging "What d'ya got?"; Bliss doesn't even know there's another choice.

But roller-derby seems a much more appropriate matriculation to life than beauty pageants. It's all elbows and knees and nose-checks while maintaining your balance going as fast as you can. You're among a group of competitors with grit in their gears and scar-tissue in their joints and they announce their aggressive tendencies with nom de guerre like Eva Destruction, Smashley Simpson, Bloody Holly, and Jabba the Slut. Bliss becomes "Babe Ruthless," and since the circuit's too small to say "a star is born," a satellite is launched into a tight circular orbit.

Her double life invariable costs her, though. 'Round about where the third commercial break should be, her best friend gets nicked for an open container violation, Bliss does the same (metaphorically) with her slacker boy-band-toy-friend, her under-age status in the league is threatened to be exposed, and she has a hissy fit with her parents. Bliss is adrift without a breeze or a paddle and it's tough to be captain of your fate with neither.

The story weeps for a happy ending and Barrymore, to her credit, is stingy with it. Bliss doesn't achieve full happiness, no fireworks go off in triumph, and she takes her lumps as lessons learned. That's the difference between Young Adult Fiction in the Movies and Adult Fiction in the Movies.

So, how did our little Drew do, directing? Not bad, actually. "Whip It" doesn't exactly snap across the eyes—there are repeated shots to fill up narrative cracks she didn't anticipate, she depends a bit too much on the lame Jimmy Fallon to provide humor in the action portions, and she leaves Page a bit high and dry in giving her motivation in some scenes. But if it's technically not smooth, the voice is uniquely Barrymore's, raucously tom-boyish, girlish in Tarentino's field of girlish. It's a woman's world; boys are just allowed to play in it.

Which makes her film different than 99.99% of films out there.

And instead of playing it safe, she begins her career calling the shots by diving deep into action territory and staging some mock-brutal roller-derby matches that are intricate in planning and a bit too careful in execution, like staging a car-wreck where most of the cars aren't moving. That's rare, though. It can't be easy duty filming a roller derby and Barrymore gets the excitement right most of the time. And, good general that she is, she puts herself in the middle, not letting her actresses do anything she wouldn't. Her "Smashley Simpson" takes most of the falls in the film and Barrymore doesn't fake the crashes. The actresses look like they're in danger, but rarely display anything but grit and it's a well-chosen cast. Eve, SNL's go-to gal Kristen Wiig, Tarentino's favorite stuntwoman Zoe Bell, and Juliette Lewis (Welcome back, Juliette!*)all display a casual toughness and nurturing bonding that makes Bliss' attraction to them seem natural and reflects Marcia Gay Harden's more austere version of it. It all makes one anticipate her next movie with fingers crossed.

"Whip It" has the feel of a well-skated over track: worn but slightly groovy, thin in parts but enough momentum in it to keep it interesting.

"Whip It" is a Matinee.

* Juliette Lewis is one of my least favorite actresses, but this role is rough, tough and mean and Lewis plays it unsympathetically without her usual mealy-mouthed mannerisms and pulls it off beautifully. Her character demands respect and the actress imbues why. Bravo.

Everyone Says I Love You

"Everyone Says I Love You" (Woody Allen, 1996) First off, the title of Woody Allen's attempted musical should read "Everyone...Says I Love You" because the meter is essential. It comes from the song that takes a large junk of time-spanning narrative from the Marx Brothers comedy "Horse Feathers." That haunting and addicting song by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby** stays in the mind a long time. And the songs Allen employs, a mix of 20's/ 30's standards ("Makin' Whoopee," "My Baby Just Cares For Me") drop the narrative to a dead stop in a way that the musicals being emulated never did.* The musical pieces feel like an interruption rather than an extension of the story, or a poetic expression of the character's thoughts, though brief attempts are made to do so. The song that works best is the first one ("Just You, Just Me") that starts without warning, out of Allen's standard white-on-black opening credits (in silence). Then Boom! We're singing...actually Edward Norton is singing in a gentle, reedy pleasant voice. Norton comes off best, genuinely attempting to "sell" the song and sentiment (and it's fun to see a joyful Norton--early in his career--galumphing out of the way of dancers, and doing a better version of the Woody Allen stammering switch-backs than the director can manage***). Everyone--save Drew Barrymore--sang their own songs, and they do pretty well, though Julia Roberts is very off-key, and Tim Roth, playing a recently paroled con, sings inconsistently sweetly. The biggest disappointment is Allen's number sung in a barely-there voice. His song is not so much plaintive, as shy and non-committal...and wrong.

The plot is as slim as anything Allen's done: a series of brief encounters with the engagement of Holden Spence (Norton) and Skylar Dandridge (Barrymore) at its hub. But Allen undercuts the effervescence of the musical format by basing the main story on the efficacy of inspired love, or love-at-first-sight. Love is an illusion he says, just like breaking into song with a full orchestra backing you up in a movie. Great. It's a bit like being inspired to song by reading The Wall Street Journal. The cast is the usual first-rate one: Alan Alda, Goldie Hawn, Lukas Haas, a young Natalie Portman and Billy Crudup, Julia Roberts, Gaby Hoffmann, and Tim Roth

Besides that opening plunge into musical-land, the charm of it all is only sporadically amusing, if warm-hearted--Allen, during instrumental portions of the songs, intercuts beautifully shot (by Carlo Di Palma) landscapes ala Fox musicals. But, there seems a long, dry spell before further joys, and, as it does so often in Allen's films, the best is saved for last--a dance between Hawn and Allen by the river Seine, which nearly matches in grace what Astaire and Rogers achieved by mixing dance and story through the use of movie-magic--the one kind of magic Allen does believe in. Although the two are far, far less capable dancers, Allen compensates by putting Hawn on a wire-rig, and she, seemingly effortlessly, floats high into the air with a natural gracefulness, and alights to earth as if weightless. It is pulled off with such suddenness and beauty that one is caught off-guard, and stunned, like that sudden drop into song at the film's beginning. It's one of the most charming...and surreal moments in the body of Allen's work. ****

*But the elephantine musicals of the 60's and 70's--that's another story.

**
Groucho: Everyone says I love you
but just what they say it for I never knew
it’s just inviting trouble for the poor sucker who
says I love you

Take a pair of rabbits who
get stuck on each other and begin to woo
and pretty soon you’ll find a million more rabbits who
say I love you

When the lion gets feeling frisky and begins to roar
there’s another lion who knows just what he’s roaring for

Everything that ever grew
the goose and the gander and the gosling too
the duck upon the water when he feels that way too
says quack quack quack

Chico: Everyone says I love you
the great big mosquito when-a-he sting you
the fly when he get stuck on the fly paper too
says I love you

Every time the cow says moo
she’s a-make the bull-a very happy too
and the rooster when he holler cock-a-doodle-doodle-doo
says I love you

Christopher Columbo he write the queen of Spain a very nice a-little note
and he’s a-write I love you, babee and then he get himself a great a-big a-boat
he’s a wise-a-guy

What do you think Columbo do
when he’s a-come here in 1492?
he said to Pocahontas achi vachi vachi voo
that means you little son of a gun, I love you

Zeppo: Everyone says I love you
the cop on the corner and the burglar too
the preacher in the pulpit and the man in the pew
says I love you

Every one, no matter who
the folks over eighty and the kid of two
the captain and the sailor and the rest of the crew
says I love you

There are only eight little letters in this phrase you’ll find
but they mean a lot more than all the other words combined

Everywhere the whole world through
the king in the palace and the peasant too
the tiger in the jungle and the monk in the zoo
says I love you

***

****