Tagline: Frank wanted the holidays to be picture perfect. What he got was family.
Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has spent his adult life working in a local wire factory earning every dollar he can to support his family. Recently retired, he realizes that over the years he has spent too little time with his four children and that it’s time to reconnect. Frank’s late wife was always his main point of contact with his kids but he decides that it’s now his responsibility to keep an eye on them. He is inspired to invite the whole extended family for a barbeque weekend. Preparations go well until one by one, such is modern life, they all have good reason to cancel.
Despite a strict warning from his doctor, Frank takes matters into his own hands and packs a bag before setting out on a journey across the US with the intention of surprising each of his children and wallowing in their success and happiness.
Frank travels to see his son David `the artist’ in New York, his daughter who is `high up in advertising’ in Chicago, his son Robert `the orchestral conductor’ in Denver and finally Rosie his youngest who is a `dancer in a Vegas show’ but before long it becomes clear to Frank that his children are not quite as happy or successful as his wife had always reported. Returning home from a journey that ends with the revelation of a family tragedy, Frank has the insight and confidence to report to his wife that despite everything “everybody’s fine.”
A heartfelt dramatic comedy “Everybody’s Fine” presents a family picture that is all too common in our modern world. Parents and siblings living hundreds of miles apart, too distracted with the stress of modern life to find time to call each other and too preoccupied with their own family and friends to find time to visit home.
About the Film
“I don’t know what it is with you kids. You always told your mother everything, and you don’t tell me anything.” – Frank Goode
No family is perfect. The more a family appears to be perfect the more likely there are secrets hiding within, and the Goode family is no different. Frank Goode worked every hour that he could to support his family and help them achieve their potential and not surprisingly at 60, he now feels as though time has passed him by and that he has missed his children growing up. Such is Frank’s enthusiasm to turn back time and reconnect with his children that he embarks on a spontaneous, transcontinental journey but soon realizes that when his wife kept him updated on his children’s progress, she protected him from the bad news and exaggerated the good.
It is no surprise that a film about family originated in a country renowned for preaching the importance of family values – Italy. The original film was written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore in 1990 and was his follow up project to the Oscar winning classic “Cinema Paradiso.”
Ever since he first read the original script in the Italian language almost two decades ago, producer Gianni Nunnari (“The Departed,” “300,” “Shutter Island”) imagined what that same father and family, so consummately Italian in Tornatore’s vision, might be like translated to the vast landscape of the United States and the broader style of an American dramatic comedy. He purchased the rights to the film, hoping, one day to revisit the story from a different cultural sensibility.
In another twist, it would take an Englishman to make that happen. When Nunnari saw the critically acclaimed, sleeper comedy hit “Waking Ned Devine,” he sensed that writer-director Kirk Jones, with his distinctly British style of comedy, had just the right mix of light touch and deep emotions to tackle a brand new adaptation of “Stanno Tutti Bene” and sent him a copy of Tornatore’s film.
Since writing and directing “Waking Ned Devine” and watching it become the second highest grossing film (proportionate to budget) in the world that year, Jones had directed “Nanny McPhee” for Universal and Working Title films which was written by and starred Emma Thompson. But, by 2007 he was looking for his next project.
Jones admits to being a fan of Tornatore and recalls that it was unusual for him to receive a DVD of a film that had already been made in a foreign language, as opposed to a script, but he responded to it immediately.
“I had been looking for my first US-based project for some time but was keen to write and direct as I had done before. This would mean that I would arrive in the States with a project that I was inherently connected to, instead of attaching myself to a studio developed movie that had already passed through the hands of a dozen writers. I wanted to keep things simple and write the script alone as I had done with `Waking Ned Devine.’”
“Finding the right project is like buying a house, you instinctively know that it’s right for you from the start and within minutes of watching the original Italian version I had really connected with it, it intrigued me, moved me emotionally and it made me laugh. It’s such a simple, passionate story,” says Jones.
Nunnari recalls, “Suddenly, I heard from Kirk and he said he really wanted to do EVERYBODY’S FINE and not only that, he wanted to do it from scratch, diving in with his own creativity and writing a new screenplay using the idea of the original movie as a starting point. He wrote a screenplay that wasn’t just a small dramedy of quirky characters but a big American journey. The way Kirk expresses himself is so fantastic – he writes full of human feeling.”
Says Jones, “I only watched the original film three times. I didn’t want to simply translate it, or make the same version in a different language, I didn’t want that and I know Tornatore wouldn’t expect it of me, I needed to make it my own. What interested me was the theme of family which is of course as universal a subject as you can hope to encounter.”
But Jones was very aware that he faced a challenge writing an American road movie as an Englishman. “I didn’t want to start work without being prepared. I took a flight to New York and then worked my way across the US very much as Frank did in the movie, staying in the cheapest motels, traveling on Greyhound buses and Amtrak trains and talking to people on the way. Traveling alone is the best way to get under the skin of a country and the best way to meet it’s people and connect with them. I took nearly 2000 photographs and recorded 100 interviews with anyone who would talk to me from cab drivers to hotel receptionists to eccentric characters on buses. It’s where many of the ideas in the movie came from; the telephone wires, the eccentric characters and real people, the bag with wheels, I saw it all for real on the road and recorded it.”
Perhaps it was Jones’ view as an outsider peering in upon the American family that made his screenplay so distinctive. Muses executive producer Callum Greene: “As an Englishman, Kirk brings a different perspective and a different viewpoint onto many things that perhaps, as Americans, we take for granted. He finds things of beauty in the every day working of family life that we might miss.”
Continue Reading and View the Theatrical Trailer
Everybody’s Fine (2009)
Directed by: Kirk Jones
Starring: Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Lucian Maisel, Damian Young, Melissa Leo, James Frain, Katherine Moennig, Chandler Frantz, Lily Mo Sheen
Screenplay by: Kirk Jones
Production Design by: Andrew Jackness
Cinematography by: Henry Braham
Film Editing by: Andrew Mondshein
Costume Design by: Aude Bronson-Howard
Set Decoration by: Chryss Hionis
Art Direction by: Drew Boughton
Music by: Dario Marianelli
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements and brief strong language.
Distributed by: Miramax Films
Release Date: December 4, 2009
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