Local, low-budget theatre demands enthusiastic commitment from its participants that almost always exceeds the profits and artistic achievements they can expect at the end of the process; it’s a scrappy, endearing pursuit that may turn quixotic for those who convince themselves they’re only a step away from winning a Tony. Everything’s Going to Be Great, directed by Jon S. Baird from a screenplay by Steven Rogers, follows a struggling regional theatre director who harbors this type of sympathetic delusion, as well as his wife and two sons, who buy into or resist his theatrical ambitions to varying extents. The film is a sentimental family drama first and foremost, aiming to provoke laughter and tears in equal measure, but it consistently falters under Baird’s leaden direction and Rogers’ stilted screenplay. The experience of watching Everything’s Going to Be Great is, in fact, akin to attending a not-quite-successful summer stock production: despite the best efforts of the cast and crew, the clumsy final product cannot muster any reaction greater than polite applause.
The 1988-set film finds the itinerant Smart family — Buddy (Bryan Cranston), Macy (Allison Janney), and sons Lester (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Derrick (Jack Champion) — something close to settled in Akron, Ohio, when Buddy receives an offer to direct a summer theatre season in New Jersey, with a highly conditional offer of a five-year contract in Milwaukee attached. Buddy is a lifelong theatre director who has never lost a passion for his work, despite his perpetually precarious financial situation and Macy’s growing exhaustion with their unconventional, unstable lifestyle. Lester, a precocious 14-year-old, is a theatre obsessive who is utterly committed to the family business, while Derrick is more interested in playing football and losing his virginity (the only two notable traits for a character who is constantly given short shrift). While the family is used to ups and downs, an unexpected cataclysm at the end of their New Jersey contract forces them to move to Kansas to live with Macy’s brother Walter (Chris Cooper), which particularly upsets Lester and brings long-simmering familial and personal struggles to the surface.
The decorated cast — which also includes Simon Rex and two Tony Award winners, Laura Benanti and Cady Huffman, in cameos — is perhaps overqualified for their roles as written. Rogers (writer of I, Tonya and Stepmom) writes reams of text for all five central characters to deliver, ostensibly giving plenty of opportunities for capital-A acting. Yet the dialogue is awkward and overwritten, frequently calling on characters to explain easily inferred subtext and extraneous backstory in shoehorned monologues, or to repeat fundamental facts about their motivations ad nauseam. Baird fails to inject any life into the dialogue-heavy film, typically planting the actors in a medium shot and letting them deliver their scenes without much variation or modulation. The result is that Janney, and particularly Cranston, sometimes veer perilously close to histrionics in their performances, and the film plods on scene-to-scene at a slack pace, never developing any sense of forward momentum. And the film’s visual aesthetic fails to compensate for its narrative faults: its period stylings in costume and production design are inconsistent, and Mark Wolf often imbues his shallow-focus digital cinematography with an unnecessary, unpleasant yellow tint.
On the more successful side of things, Ainsworth is a capable young performer who clearly has a precise understanding of his character, and Janney and Cooper find much-needed nuance in their characters in the film’s third act. Yet these small compensations, in addition to a general sense of earnest, heartfelt intent behind the film, cannot make up for the prevailing awkwardness of its execution. Family strife and backstage drama have formed the material for many great films, but in the case of Everything’s Going to Be Great, the viewer is never given a good reason to emotionally invest in the theatrical family at its center.
DIRECTOR: Jon S. Baird; CAST: Bryan Cranston, Allison Janney, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Jack Champion; DISTRIBUTOR: Lionsgate; IN THEATERS: June 20; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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