Everybody's Fine

The film Giuseppe Tornatore made after Cinema Paradiso. Matteo is a retired civil servant living alone in Sicily. He has five children, scattered across different Italian cities. One day he sets off without warning, deciding to visit each of them in turn. Across the journey the gap opens between the lives his children have described to him and the lives they actually have. Nobody meant to lie to him; everyone gave him only good news, and as that accumulated the picture in the father's head became entirely wrong. The pain comes from there: the children kept quiet to protect him, and the father, not knowing he was being protected, counted himself distant from them. Marcello Mastroianni plays Matteo. Ennio Morricone wrote the music. The narrative proceeds as a road film, and the tone shifts as the cities do. It was remade in America in 2009 with Robert De Niro. An important work for anyone who likes Italian cinema and quiet dramas built on family. For a viewer who avoids emotionally heavy films, this one is sorrowful from beginning to end and does not relieve it at the close.