Everybody’s Fine

A retired widower (Robert De Niro), disappointed when his adult kids don’t show up for a visit, decides to drop in on each of them (Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, Drew Barrymore) one by one, even though they’re scattered across the country and he’s under doctor’s orders not to travel. Writer-director Kirk Jones, an Englishman making his first movie in America, seems clueless about what cross-country travel in the United States entails. Worse yet, his grasp of family dynamics is no more convincing than his geography—in De Niro’s character, he paints a portrait of an out-of-touch old fool who never really got to know his kids, then would have us believe he figures out the truth in a blinding flash of fatherly intuition. This cast is overdue for a project worthy of their talents, but Jones hasn’t provided it.