Product: Everybody's Fine (2009)
Rating: 1.0
The Secret, Hidden Agenda of This Movie: An Default Argument for Gay Child-Rearing!
We watched this movie last night and I kept saying to my husband, this very manipulative movie constitutes a de facto argument for gay child-rearing. This De Niro character seems a ball of horrible parental cliches rolled into one. To such an extent that it seems unfair to straight dads. He is at once unconsciously nasty, disempowering, clueless and self-righteously proud of the misinformation that fills his head. Surely nobody has quite the bases covered in such a throughly even way. That evenness of blunderbuss emotional inappropriateness is what tells you that this movie was from the get-go conceived as a very manipulative affair. They were hoping to have a sort of parent-child Pavlovian effect on as many people as possible and make some dough out of very serious and tender issue. It is pretty disgusting. People who would make a thing like this are probably beyond shame. But for consumers it is worth noting that films as an "art form" have apparently made a significant negative progression. They always contained manipulation, but some fellow-feeling or sense of decency prevailed somehow. They tugged at heartstrings to bolster commonly accepted healthful emotions. Or when they did horror it was horror, and calculated to fulfill other psychic needs of certain age groups. But here is a new low. It tries to spread the psychological complexity so throughly and recklessly that it will likely effect everyone, and then, amazingly tops it off with a cherry of even more blunderbuss misunderstanding. On this note the best scene is when the father character is in a dream sequence at a table with this kids as children, but they are all are spouting adult insights. Naturally, per the sledge-hammer manipulation of the director, the father character is treating them all like children. But the scene seems consciously modeled after Alice and Wonderland sitting at table with the Mad Hatter and other characters. Except that whereas that famous scene offered artistic insight, this one is like a bull-in-a-china-shop's attempt at a weird and unlikely table decorum. In other words, it is not the insight that comes from absurdist exaggeration, but the absurdity of pornography, emotional pornography. As if to confirm this very fact the movie ends with the most pornographically absurd moment of all. Having just learned recently that one of his kids died of over-dose, and that he was lied to by his kids who don't trust his maturity one bit, he is moved by all this into even more emotional prevarication. We knew he was not even remotely judging the facts of life accurately when he visited his musician son who is now the percussionist for a major symphony orchestra in Denver. In case anyone is not aware of the classical music world, which is sadly the apparent presumption of the makers of the film, being a percussionist in a major orchestra is a very big deal. And Denver, though not the Boston Symphony, would certainly count. But the father character who is intended to be more a spectral presence that anything emotional real, bizarrely chides the son for settling for "playing the drums." Well, this is just hilarious. And by the way I can well imagine virtuoso timpanists, on whom virtually every great symphony ever written rely, just shaking their heads in disbelief, and wanting to strike the gong in their percussion battery if like the gong-show it would get the father character to be pulled off the stage. But no, he has yet greater emotional misprisions to perform. But none as great as the final lines where he tells himself "Everybody's Fine". Though a significant percentage of his family fineness is inconvenienced by the fact of being quite dead, he asserts his right as paterfamilias for delusion. It is such a ghoulish performance all the way around that it really does make you wonder if it is meant to set the mind wondering if there might, perchance, be an alternative to this hyperbolic emotional recklessness of a man like this. Might it be in gay people who are famously, allegedly, more in touch with their emotions. Who knows if this was even in the background. Probably they just wanted to make money. And they found a newly low way to do it.