Everybody’s Fine is one of those movies that suffers because of its own advertising. From the ads and trailers you might thing that Fine is a light-hearted family movie set during the holiday season. Well, I won’t deny that the film has its lighter moments, or that it’s about a family, but this isn’t exactly a one man Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Robert De Niro’s widower visits his loveably dysfunctional kids over Christmas. But Christmas isn’t even mentioned till the end of the movie, and the dysfunction of the kids is hardly the jovial kind. There’s not a lot of mirth making in Everybody’s Fine. In fact, the only ones that seem to be having any fun are the studio’s guys in publicity.

The film itself has been compared favourably to the 2002 Oscar-nominated About Schmidt, another movie about a senior gentleman taking to the open road. Just as Jack Nicholson dressed down to play Schmidt, De Niro rearranges his typical tough guy persona to play someone a little more real, a little more worn around the edges. De Niro’s Frank is a retired blue-collar worker that spent a lifetime installing the insulation on telephone wire. It was a simple life for a simple man that wanted nothing more than to do right by his wife and kids. But now his wife is gone and all the kids have moved away. Getting them to even call their father is a job in and of itself.

After Frank attempts to get all his kids around the same table for a family gathering only to have them all cancel at the last minute, he decides to take matters into his own hands and go to visit them. It doesn’t take Frank long to realize that not all is right with his children’s lives. His son David (Austin Lysy) isn’t at home at his New York City apartment and he can’t be reached by phone. There seems to be some odd tension in the Chicago home of his daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale). His son Robert (Sam Rockwell) in Denver is ashamed that he’s not more successful and fears what his father thinks. And Rosie (Drew Barrymore), though seemingly happy to see her father, is definitely keeping something to herself.

This is where the advertising really leads you astray because Frank’s grown children have some serious issues. Frank himself is also far from the curmudgeonly stick in the mud that’s implied, as if De Niro’s merely playing a grumpy old man that’s humbugging it cross country. Because of this slight though, I did find Everybody’s Fine to be a pleasant surprise. De Niro’s quiet suffering is sad and understandable, but there is implied the notion that he has himself partially to blame for pushing his kids so darn hard. It was also refreshing to see De Niro play someone that was neither a tough guy nor a wise guy, someone simpler and more grounded. There’s a reason this man is called the best actor of his generation, and he proves it here despite the lacklustre script.

Indeed, there are a number of elements in Everybody’s Fine that will be irksome to the discerning movie viewer. The plight of David is rather telegraphed in advanced as the script thinks its playing coy with the character’s eventual fate. It was also somewhat difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea that these kids were so far out of touch with their father that he didn’t know that one was lying about their job, another their family situation and the third one an unknown child and questioned sexuality. The device that director Kirk Jones uses to air out all this dirty laundry is interesting, but it does rob many of the actors of giving their characters any key moment of epiphany. The result is that the movie feels kind of static and carries more the appearance of a difficult family drama then mining any deep emotion from the story. The potential was there, far more than the marketers give the film credit for, but Everybody’s Fine is just okay.