Everybody's Fine
1990, PG, 126 min. Directed by Guiseppe Tornatore. Starring Marcello Mastroianni, Michele Morgan, Marino Cenna, Roberto Nobile, Valeria Cavali, Norma Matelli.
REVIEWED By Kathleen Maher, Fri., June 28, 1991
At first, Tornatore's followup film to his successful and extraordinary film, Cinema Paradiso, may seem like a sympathetic and sentimental view of old age but just as Cinema Paradiso hid a hard edge beneath a nostalgic veneer, so too does Everybody's Fine have its dollop of bitterness. After all, this is not an old man's movie. Tornatore is young man who makes movies that seem like they were made by an old man. In Everybody's Fine, Marcello Mastroianni, giving up his dashing and worldly ways, plays a proud, self-satisfied and more than a little foolish old man who, when his children don't arrive to visit him in Sicily for summer vacation, packs up and heads up the mainland to see them. This is a trip of revelation for the old man who believes his children to be happy and wealthy. Gradually, the truth that their lives are no more extraordinary than anyone else's begins to dawn on him as he stops in Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan and Torino, to see each of his five children. He may become less annoying as he's humbled by the truth, but he never seems to realize the destructive nature of his proud love. At night, however, he's haunted by terrible dreams of a beatiful Fellinian day at the beach complete with a caravan of horses, destroyed by an ominous black balloon that descends and steals his children. Is it time that steals his children or his own crushing demands on them? Mastroianni, as he so frequently does, shows a brave willingness to explore his character, giving him dignity and foolishness. He is joined in a sweet interlude by French actress Michele Morgan who warns him that the old have to work at maintaining comforting illusions. This is a sweetly sad movie that doesn't really give the old man a break, but it kindly allows him his faults.
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July 10, 1992
Everybody's Fine, Guiseppe Tornatore, Marcello Mastroianni, Michele Morgan, Marino Cenna, Roberto Nobile, Valeria Cavali, Norma Matelli