Travelin' Dad: Everybody's Fine

Retired after a life of coating cables in PVC, his kids now scattered across the country, his wife’s death still a fresh wound, Frank Goode (Robert De Niro) has nothing but time. The prospect of a rare gathering of the surviving clan has him unloading wads of cash on a new barbecue, heaps of filet mignon, and fancy wine he knows nothing about. It’s all the more heart-wrenching then when all four of his kids call to cancel at the last minute. Even at this early stage in Everybody’s Fine events conspire to gut Frank—and the rest of us—emotionally. But Frank’s a trooper. He packs a small suitcase and sets out to visit his offspring whether they like it or not. So we have here a road movie of sorts, one where each stop yields fresh revelations about Frank’s ostensibly perfect family, the lot having long ago made a pact to withhold from dad all their disappointments, shortcomings, or personal tragedies.

Writer/director Kirk Jones’ remake of the 1990 Italian tearjerker employs some shrewd devices to deliver exposition while sticking closely to Frank’s point-of-view. The telephone wires Frank passes as he’s whisked around the country courtesy of Amtrak or Greyhound emit conversations between his children informing us of troubles unknown to him, and the blur of nostalgia that has Frank “see” his children in their pint-sized versions when they reunite in the present, building up to a dream sequence in which present-day Frank converses with a bunch of ten-year-olds about precisely those matters his adult kids won’t discuss. This last bit could have been something strange and interesting, yet Jones’ execution of these devices is across the board pretty corny—almost as corny as the light gags about Frank’s inability to use chopsticks, or Dario Marianelli’s sappy score. Everybody’s Fine is a movie determined to keep its aim safely within range of the middlebrow, its protracted denouement letting no opportunity to tie up every last possible knot, revealing a conspicuous paucity of faith in its audience’s imagination. Yet for all that, you know, the movie really works.

This is partly due to De Niro, so relaxed in his own skin, never crowding his fellow actors in any given scene, so deft with conveying bottled-up feelings, so touching in the simplest moments—the way he stifles a broader smile when he coerces his eldest daughter to say out loud that she’s a partner in his ad agency; his understated playing of the scene where he phones his own house just to hear his dead wife’s voice on the answering machine. But the greater credit is due to the essential wisdom of the story, which for all its schmaltz never rings false, at least not in the ways that really count. It’s a story about confronting that powerful myth that all your hard work will ensure you some autumnal reward in the shape of your children's successes. A lot of us have fathers like Frank, working class guys who push too hard, who we can’t bear to disappoint. Some of us are Frank—though I have a harder time seeing this aging widower going out to see this sort of movie. The point is that Everybody’s Fine isn’t very artful, but it is truthful, and quite moving. Sometimes that’s fine enough.

Lunatic fringe: Duncan Jones talks about sending Sam Rockwell straight to the Moon

We first catch sight of Sam Bell working the treadmill, pale and beardy as a muskrat, sporting a T-shirt that reads “Wake me when it’s quitting time.” Sam’s the sole human inhabitant on the lunar landscape, an on-site foreman and crew combo for a project that’s single-handedly rescuing Earth from its energy crisis by mining the local geology for deposits of solar power. (A clever gag has him grooving at one point to ‘Walkin’ on Sunshine.’) He’s on a three-year stint that’s nearly reached its terminus. The station is modern, at once buzzingly bright and cocoon-like, but also grimy with isolation, a disheveled bachelor pad more remote than the Unabomber’s. Other than occasional prerecorded messages beamed to him from his wife and toddler back home, the closest approximation to company is a boxy robot named GERTY, whose little screen offers a series of emoticons in lieu of facial expressions and converses with Sam in the not especially comforting tones of Kevin Spacey.

The loneliness is thick, the food all comes in baggies, and the night never ends. Moon is the antidote to space opera explosion movie. The frontiers it traipses upon are internal as much as extraterrestrial. Sam’s ostensibly gleeful last days on the moon are thwarted by an accident he has while driving his lunar land rover. He already seems to have been suffering from hallucinations before the crack-up, and now in his weakened, perhaps paranoid state things become only more confusing. Sam overhears potentially conspiratorial murmurings between GERTY and ground control, and he starts to see double—as in another Sam. Embodied by the wonderful, still underused Sam Rockwell in what is essentially a one-man show, Sam Bell begins to question all his assumptions about his life on the moon, his purpose there, and the very fabric of his perceived reality. If there was someone to form a union with, maybe he could go on strike. Then again, maybe there is someone…

Director and co-scenarist Duncan Jones cut his teeth making commercials, but it’s probably more pertinent that he studied philosophy before graduating from London Film School. Extrapolating on the work of Daniel Bennett and Peter Singer in applied ethics, Jones wrote an independent study thesis titled How to Kill Your Computer Friend: An Investigation of the Mind/Body Problem and How It Relates to the Hypothetical Creation of a Thinking Machine, which sounds very much like a dry-run for some of the ideas percolating in his feature debut. To be sure, it is ideas, and the emotional prompts they house, that imbue Moon with its richest features. The story itself may not seem fully propelled or resolved in any conventional sense, but the way revelations unfold—and, strangely enough, the way certain relationships develop—are what make this trip highly rewarding.

Moon director Duncan Jones

When I spoke with Jones he seemed energized, full of praise for Rockwell, and very friendly and easy to engage in discussion about all the notions and emotions lovingly poured into Moon. If he was slightly less enthused about discussing the fact that he’s the son of David Bowie, that’s pretty understandable, but I couldn’t resist asking one question. I think you’ll see why.

JB: For such an intimate film, Moon addresses an impressive number of contemporary anxieties. I’m thinking not only about environmental and genetic science concerns, but also about our dependency on telecommunications to verify our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. Did you set out to tap into these anxieties or did things just kind of turn out that way once you started fleshing out the premise?

Duncan Jones: The idea of long-distance relationships was very much a conscious one. My personal life at the time was burdened with a long-distance relationship and I wanted to channel that emotional material into the film. But the idea of social networking and using technology to communicate with people in a way that’s less direct that actually meeting them, that was more subconscious—though it’s something people seem to feel a real connection with.

JB: Your film caused me to reflect on how nostalgia-generative technology has become. We now have so many ways of archiving virtually every form of communication available to us. It’s as though we don’t necessarily have to nourish our relationships if we can get some morbid emotional fix by replaying their greatest hits.

DJ: Absolutely. I must admit that when I look through my own archive of emails I see an awful lot of old message from ex-girlfriends. We’re able now to sort of carry so much of our history around with us this way.

JB: I do the same thing. Makes me think of that Smog song where Bill Callahan sings about “getting off on the pornography of my past.”

DJ: [Laughs] That’s a great line!


JB: Another critical motif in Moon addresses the ways in which the culture is geared toward making absolutely everything disposable, including individuals.

DJ: Planned obsolescence, sure. That’s definitely there in the subtext. But in contrast to that, we also wanted to get across the value of humanity, how every individual counts—no matter how these individuals are brought into the world.

JB: Well, as I was watching Moon there was this knee-jerk part of me that was wondering who I was rooting for, only to realize that I didn’t want to see anything bad happen to any of the strange individuals who crop up.

DJ: And I think that’s how the characters end up feeling. They become like brothers, antagonistic but finally wanting to help each other.


JB: There’s a clever series of red herrings for sci-fi aficionados in Moon’s early scenes. You set a tone of comfortable familiarity by openly invoking such influential films as 2001 and Solaris, only to go in quite a different direction, particularly with the way you develop GERTY, the robot that so immediately recalls 2001’s HAL 9000 but whose own trajectory proves quite distinct. I wonder how you felt about the ostensible burden of influence one assumes when trying to make a thoughtful science fiction film.

DJ: Because I was so in love with those films the only burden I felt was to get it right. If I was going to pay homage I wanted it to be clear that I’d truly appreciated and absorbed the source material. We wanted to utilize these references to films we love, yet it was integral that we create something original, that we give the audience a new experience. What makes it work, I hope, is the personal stuff we brought into it, again, the long-distance relationship that I was going through, or the idea of meeting yourself and how would you get along. I’ve always been deeply intrigued by this thought experiment, by the question of whether or not I would like myself. If I met myself as a younger age, for example, I know that my younger self would have problems with me now, and I’m almost certain that me now would be frustrated by the younger me.

JB: I think this is also where science fiction can lead us back to older narrative archetypes, those involving doubles, this notion that a double is inherently suspicious, that there isn’t room enough for the two of us. Philip K. Dick was especially visionary in this regard. Were his books important to you either growing up or as you were developing Moon?

DJ: I was a huge Philip K. Dick fan growing up. I was also a big J.G. Ballard fan. His approach to taking what’s almost a contemporary setting and then adding a single little twist that turns it into science fiction is something I’ve always admired.

JB: And he had such a talent for crafting these utterly unsentimental tales that nevertheless provoke an intense emotional response.

DJ: It just breaks my heart that so many of his best works have already been optioned for films, because I’d love to do one!

JB: Before we run out of time I did have one inevitable dad question to ask.

DJ: Ah well, go on. You can have one.

JB: When we look back on your father’s breakthrough single from 40 years ago and compare it to Moon, there’s an intriguing symmetry of motifs: the lone man isolated in space, missing his wife, dependent on tenuous communication with the distant earth. Were you thinking about ‘Space Oddity’ at any point during the conception of Moon?

DJ: I totally understand the question and I know it might be impossible for people to believe, but I really wasn’t. It’s just a very strange piece of synchronicity. I was brought up by my dad, my parents having gotten divorced when I was very young, and I was probably surrounded by an awful lot of the same things that were interesting him when he was still roughly in that same creative period, so I’m sure it had a massive effect on me. But when I was writing Moon none of my dad’s work was what I was thinking about. It was my own personal situation, my wanting to work with Sam Rockwell, and talking about all these great science-fiction films from the 70s and 80s. That was really the root of it all. The rest just has to do with what planets you tend to orbit, I guess.

Interview with the vampire: Frost/Nixon

Success in America is unlike success anywhere else, says David Frost. Failure, one assumes, achieves an equally singular stature. And so the terms are set for Frost/Nixon, Ron Howard’s movie of Peter Morgan’s play, which was indeed successful in America, and was inspired by something that took place there in 1977, when English talk show host Frost sat with former President Richard Nixon for nearly 30 hours of interviews that made broadcast history. Both sought to redeem failures, or slumps, in their careers. The event wasn’t exactly a revelation, but it did find an underdog unsettling a formidable orator sufficiently to yield something like an apology for abuses of power. The movie then is timely, coming precisely when millions crave to see another US President confess to not dissimilar sins.

For all his monstrous associations, Nixon is often flattered by Hollywood, and Frank Langella, with his handsomeness, sonorous voice and effortless charisma, is a delight to watch even if he misses those traces of sheer weirdness that perhaps no actor need do justice to since we have the real Nixon so heavily documented for posterity. I adore Langella, but I don’t think he quite escapes the confines of impersonation. His facial mask is impressive, but it tethers him to too limited an array of expressions. Michael Sheen, playing an easy-to-dismiss puff-meister has to work harder and thus gets us more involved as Frost, the film’s actual protagonist, and one rather aligned in his obstacles with Sheen’s Tony Blair in The Queen, also written by Morgan. It’s a part that probably won’t get the same accolades but which the story absolutely hinges on, especially when the movie’s authors manage the material in less than inspired ways.

Morgan’s written his own adaptation, and while you can’t blame the guy for wanting to “open up” the play, it’s hard not to notice that the immediacy and tension of the theatre is sorely missed. The action keeps getting diluted, and the supporting roles are at times left too exposed to scrutiny, like Rebecca Hall’s Caroline Cushing, who hangs around a lot but is the epitome of arm decoration for the male lead, a way of ensuring that we know he’s not gay.

Howard for his part does nothing to spoil the entertainment value of Frost/Nixon—he’s far too safe a director for that—but he doesn’t stir it up much either, despite a Hans Zimmer score that at times sounds better suited to a spy thriller or submarine movie. There’s a compelling statement near the end where investigative journalist James Reston, played by Sam Rockwell, talks about “the reductive power of the close-up.” Howard, in his typically workmanlike but dazzlingly unreflexive way, directs Frost/Nixon as though he hadn’t read this page in the script, offering us, well, a whole lot of close-ups. And boy, are they ever reductive. It doesn’t seem like Howard considered how a movie version might offer something vital that the play—not to mention the actual televised event, with its ample number of close-ups—could not. But he’s dutifully revived a genuinely interesting media landmark and let it play as a fun drama, and that’s reason enough to check it out.

Sex and the pity: Sam Rockwell gets too much action, not enough love, just enough lactose, in mostly impotent Choke

It took a long time, but Sam Rockwell has finally become Edward Norton. The process was subtle at first, starting maybe with mistaking Rockwell’s face in promo materials for Norton’s, like how you might have initially mistaken Jake Gyllenhaal for Tobey Maguire. But things have now come full circle with Rockwell’s starring role in Choke, the second movie to be made from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, the first being Fight Club, nearly ten years old now, the movie that confirmed Norton as something kind of exhilaratingly unique amongst his peers, a guy who can be an absolutely fearful thug while never seeming less than vulnerable, intelligent and spookily precise. Rockwell, an altogether shaggier leading man, of course has his own distinct traits, and that special hubris that expresses itself through chronic bad hair. Yet his vague if nagging resemblance to Norton—a resemblance certainly more rewarding to consider than the one he bears to Dana Carvey—is accentuated by his equally considerable talents, often viscerally pointed presence, and that schoolboy face that masks something invariably desperate, sinister or seedy.

If only Choke had even the slightest chance of being the simultaneously commercial and cult success that Fight Club remains. The directorial debut of Clark Gregg—one of those actors you’ve seen a dozen times and every time wonder, where did I see that guy?—the movie reassures us that there’s no variation on transgressive behaviour that can’t be co-opted by banal rom-com convention. Choke is about a historical interpreter and rabid sex addict (Rockwell), a ruddy, glum slob of a man rarely outdone with regards to nihilistic crassness, yet with his severe Oedipal complex coming to a head just as the pretty doctor (Kelly MacDonald) looking after his increasingly demented mom (Angelica Huston) starts to come on all tenderly, the movie boils down to that slightest of concoctions: the reform-the-gigolo fable. It’s a movie you could probably take your auntie to, listen to her cluck her tongue at, and when it’s over share a hug for having seen a movie about what in the end was really just a sweet guy in need of some direction.

Gregg’s approach to the material is a mess of conflicting intentions. The opening sequence alone, with Nathan Larson’s fussy, heavily punctuated, whimsical score, the insistently overstated voice-over Rockwell does his best to dignify, the crappy digital cinematography (which, incredibly, comes courtesy of David Gordon Green regular Tim Orr, otherwise one of the finest in the business) and the little CGI “fantasy” inserts making very awkward bedfellows, conveys nothing in the vicinity of directorial assurance. Every other element seems to apologize for the story’s fundamental scuzzyness, which is problematic since most of the better gags arise from this very scuz, like the scene where Gregg himself, in a supporting role, takes consolation from Rockwell while the girl Gregg’s in love with lays asleep in a haystack with Rockwell’s dick in her fist.

Paternity, persona, identity—ostensibly meaty themes are slapped on like house paint in an effort to elevate the story from what’s essentially a Rob Schneider vehicle. Duration, too, seems tied up in the gambit for seeming legitimacy—the movie’s draggy incessant flashbacks make it feel positively Oscar-length. Yet how weird is this: Huston is kind of terrific, especially in those flashbacks, lovely, charismatic, playing another crooked and/or cracked mom (see The Grifters, Buffalo 66, The Darjeeling Limited), this one’s idea of a family outing being breaking into a zoo at night and releasing a pissed-off lynx. MacDonald is done no favours by her vacuously quirky, baldly convenient romantic interest, but Rockwell for his part, going for broke, makes you almost kinda care. It helps a lot when he’s funny, which, through no fault of his own, he often isn’t. But now that he’s fulfilled his evolutionary promise of Nortonation, maybe he’ll get the roles he deserves, instead of getting stuck in this friendly version of The Tom Sizemore Story.

Joshua: The kid slays in the picture

When Joshua received its lamentably minor theatrical release last summer, the artwork for the film showed a giant framed portrait of the film’s 9-year-old bad seed with his anchorman hair and eerily innocuous expression hanging before the actual Joshua, looking diminutive against it, his back facing us. I found the image intriguing and looked forward to the film. I seemed to have been in the minority.

The revised artwork gracing the cover of Maple’s Joshua DVD, bathed in deep red and featuring the shadowy figure of Joshua’s mother looking vulnerable below a looming, more obviously sinister Joshua, is far less ambiguous in conveying the film’s place within the horror genre. I’m sympathetic to the marketing division –this cover will probably generate more pick-ups– yet this sort of Omen fan baiting hardly represents the true merits of this terrifically unnerving, subtle and complex chiller, which works not through violent imagery or apocalyptic prophesies but through banal family dynamics.

Directed by George Ratliff and written by Ratliff and David Gilbert, Joshua opens with the birth of the second child of Brad (Sam Rockwell) and Abby (Vera Farmiga), parents to the titular piano prodigy (Jacob Kogan). One suspects that, like most kids, the emotionally repressed Joshua feels threatened by the bald, wiggling, wailing intruder. One also suspects that Brad and Abby, perfectly likable yuppies eager to uphold an air of normalcy, are basically content to be distracted from their stuffy, introspective first-born, who occupies himself playing Bartók and reading about Egyptian funerary practices.

What gradually develops through the tightly constructed script, bold editing, creeping camerawork and superlative ensemble cast, is a series of blows to the family order, fed by forces every parent understands: postpartum depression, issues of identity linked to birth order, occupational instability, meddlesome grandparents, hormonal havoc, parental duty sharing. Strategically exploiting these forces is Joshua, whose increasingly apparent malice is, right up into the third act, consistently undercut by his sympathetic position as the neglected weird one vying for attention and favour. Whether the kid’s an evil little bastard or his elders had it coming should make for interesting debate afterwards.

In the disc’s supplementary interviews Ratliff expresses frustration over comparisons between Joshua and Rosemary’s Baby. The crucial difference between the films, Ratliff explains, is that Polanski’s classic depends on supernatural elements to invoke chills. These protests are both inaccurate and unneeded. Joshua stands on its own just fine, and aligning it with Rosemary’s Baby only enhances the viewer’s pleasure is tracing its rich lineage. However you read the Satanic elements in Rosemary’s Baby, its deeper resonance comes from precisely the same place as Joshua’s: recognizable bourgeois familial anxieties enveloped by the hothouse of Manhattan’s upper east side. And like Rosemary’s Baby, Joshua has the distinction of being a movie that no new parents want to see –but they probably should.