Don't Let The Sun Go Down

Please note the remarkable lack of expletives, and enjoy it while it lasts, as I furiously attempt to decode Niume's conspiracy to make me full of myself and still shy away from a Facebook massacre

Ever since Nicholson inhabited About Schmidt as a paean to the over-rated radicalism of the Kennedy era, with its giants now tottering, the industry seems to have reinvented the swan song as a revitalized subgenre. For Pacino this might have been The Humbling, which did more for its octogenarian author than for the Italian American grandee reprising its title character. For Eastwood it was Grand Torino, despite the fact that Million Dollar Baby was one of the most controversial films of this century's first decade. De Niro has yet to fill this niche. But Everybody's Fine, his 09 comedy drama, notches a fourth rung on the ladder from the top, and comes fairly close to letting us reminisce the burrowed fury of De Niro's signature roles. The retired Frank who sits on his absentee son's stoop in New York might indeed echo Scorsese's anti-hero Bickle from Taxi Driver, just as the dream sequence toward the end of the film, with a dark and raging cloud overhead, might lead us to remember the sheer energy it took for De Niro to embody Jake LaMotta.

Raging Bull, in point of fact, is one of the few Scorsese vehicles with which this lesser Italian American has no empirical quarrel, standing alone among her superlative peers. It is probably the best and greatest film to explain the Italian imprint on the American soul, The Godfather and its like notwithstanding; Everybody's Fine inhabits a different tempo, and is a mature film for an adult audience, one which industry insiders complain we never go to see.

It hits all the right cues, that we live in a mega mart alienated and gated world, isolated soap bubbles on the weary health stricken back of the industrial age, which De Niro's Frank embodies with his damaged pulmonary function. The script, despite De Niro's carrying power, is far too schematic and predictable, but you need to ignore that, and look for the small glimmers, the poignant self-references to De Niro's giant footprint in our fading baby boomer, post-beatnik lives, like the musical son introducing him as "my famous dad," or the additional allusions to Penny Marshall's Awakenings, where De Niro and the sorely departed Robin Williams have to carry an absurd institutional story. Yes, that's right. As a movie where disease is the antagonist, Awakenings is beyond a bad joke, but De Niro's furious enemy combatant tactics against his own body make Marshall's pesky incidental instances when dealing with catatonia something more. He cannot do this in Everybody's Fine, even with emotional wounds from which father's never recover, but it's nonetheless worth seeing, to bow our heads, a sentimental au revoir.