Everybody’s Fine (2009): D

The once-great Robert De Niro plummets to new lows with Everybody’s Fine, a story about listening, understanding, forgiving and other mushy platitudes that begins as merely intolerable and ends up borderline-reprehensible. In this remake of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 Italian original, De Niro is Frank, a widower who decides, when his four kids cancel their plans to visit for the holidays, to visit them instead, despite that pesky heart condition that requires regular medication and rest. At his various destinations, Frank finds either no one home or rude, uncaring brats (played perfunctorily by Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore) who treat him like an annoyance while putting up phony cheery façades to please a paterfamilias who, it turns out, was actually something of a demanding prick. If you think everyone is going to learn something by the end of this drivel, you’re darn tootin', but not before writer/director Kirk Jones has thoroughly reduced his lead to the butt of countless demeaning, look-at-the-clueless-senior-citizen jokes. Frank doesn’t know how to hit a golf ball! Frank doesn’t realize his suitcase can be wheeled with a handle! Frank doesn’t know how to use chopsticks, and is such a fuddy-duddy that he takes souvenir snapshots (with a film, not digital, camera) of a giant flat-screen TV! Repeatedly hammering home that Frank is a goofy old fogey is Everybody’s Fine’s primary, turgid means of humor. Yet it’s the film’s bathos (replete with saccharine pop songs and a general faux-folksy atmosphere) that reeks most pungently, from Frank’s visions of his kids as young children – culminating in a painfully corny around-the-picnic-table hallucination – to a climactic death handled in such a shamelessly and callously manipulative way that the wannabe feel-good film elicits waves of yuletide resentment and fury.