The tough-guy schtick doesn’t last forever, so actors like Robert De Niro stay credible by re-concocting their personas in unlikely settings. Not everything he has tried has been an outright success, but De Niro’s soft-edge experiments like this movie—where he plays a recent widower chasing down his grown children (including Sam Rockwell and Drew Barrymore) for an overdue visit—are engaging nonetheless. Without being a film for the ages, Everybody’s Fine gets a lot of family dynamics right. It’s usually the mothers who commiserate with children about life’s difficulties, and De Niro accurately conveys a father’s hurt and confusion about being kept out of the loop.
This article appears in Dec 10-16, 2009.