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‘Everybody’s Fine’
By Rita Kempley
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 28, 1991
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"Everybody's Fine" takes a sentimental journey through the emotional and geographic landscapes of modern Italy. A bittersweet film from Giuseppe Tornatore of "Cinema Paradiso," it concerns a charming old man's efforts to reconcile fond memories of his children with the disappointing realities of their adult lives. It is, on its saddest level, a meditation on living too long.A thoughtful, slow-moving drama, it gets its pace from hero Mateo Scuro, a Sicilian patriarch who decides to pay surprise visits to his five children, now scattered throughout Italy. His travels, mostly by train, will take him from his quiet island kitchen to the overcrowded clamor of the mainland and from ignorant bliss to unwelcome awareness. Marcello Mastroianni manages to be both debonair and doddering as Mateo, who finds not only his family but a brief flirtation on the road. His eyes swim bewildered behind glasses thick as beer mugs, a tragicomical symbol of his inability to see things as they are. Still he is our guide to Tornatore's Italy with its shrouded monuments, empty fountains and polluted skies. And like so many of us, he looks but chooses not to see. After considerable difficulty, he manages to contact four of his offspring, none of whom has lived up to his hopes for them. The actress is an underwear model, the powerful official a party underling, the executive a telephone operator, and so on. Mateo is a victim of his children's wish to please him, to live up to his high ideals, just as they are the victims of their own strict upbringing and lack of abilities. Tornatore, who directed from a screenplay co-written with Tonino Guerra of "Amarcord," has been called mawkish by his critics. Yet "Everybody's Fine" is only schmaltzy on the surface. In essence it is a wistful tragedy of progress that casts down "Cinema Paradiso's" nostalgia as a kind of time blindness. A pessimistic appraisal of old values tangled in new technology, it agrees with another recent Italian import, "The Bicycle Thief": Answering machines and television dehumanize and distance us from one another. Rich with meaning, this warmly acted and crafted film tells us that we can't live without lying to ourselves a little bit, especially if we must outlive our dreams. How are we doing? Only a metaphysically blind man would answer, "Everybody's Fine." "Everybody's Fine" is not rated but suited to general audiences.
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