Bang!
Oh my god, everybody! Get down! This movie got me — oh my god, it got me! It got me right in the feels!
Sigh… you know, they say you never see the movie with your name on it. But I just saw “Everything’s Going to Be Great” and it’s me all over. Jon S. Baird’s kind and cutting drama about a family trying, failing, and trying all over again to make it in the theater is a heartening drama and a great big smile of a comedy. “Everything’s Going to Be Great” understands the hopeless can-do spirit of not quite getting there but coming close enough that you’ll never, ever give up.
Benjamin Evan Ainsworth stars, brightly, as Lester Smart, a finely dressed adolescent who fantasizes about befriending Noël Coward and Ruth Gordon. He doesn’t quite know he’s gay, but he knows that “vagina makes his skin crawl,” so he’ll get there eventually. He lives in Akron, Ohio, with his father Buddy, played by Bryan Cranston, whose mustache curls at the edges so you know he’s quirky but fancy. Buddy and his wife Macy, played by Allison Janney, run a local theater and Lester wants to follow in his father’s footsteps, then catch up to him, then keep on walking to proper fame and stardom.
His brother, Derrick, played by Jack Champion, just wants to have sex and play football. But if you look closely when nobody’s watching and everyone else is singing “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” he knows the words, too. He likes the music, at least a little. Derrick long since came out to his parents as normal kid, and they kind of understand it, and they wish him well. But they’re not going to stay in Akron just because he’s got a girlfriend and a steady job at the Foot Locker.
The Smart family packs it up and risks it all on fame and fortune … in New Jersey, and maybe Milwaukee if they play their cards right. Macy can’t help but worry about money, since nobody else does. Buddy just points out they’re “rich in so many ways” and thinks that’s the end of the conversation. They love each other. They’re so, so different.
Everything that comes out of everyone’s mouths, even regular derricks like Derrick, is painterly. “Everything’s Going to Be Great” doesn’t just have great characters — it’s got refinement. Steven Rogers, who previously wrote Allison Janney all the way to the Oscars with the biopic “I, Tonya,” doesn’t settle for funny because wry is twice as good. He knows how to break a heart. He knows how to heal it. What a treasure.
Jon S. Baird is the same director who gave us “Stan & Ollie,” which should be a classic biopic about the theater, except nobody saw it. I’m still mad about that, but I can be patient. Maybe if I mention it more someone will finally give it a chance. I don’t know if everyone will flock to “Everything’s Going to Be Great,” but I hope the right theater kids find it, because it’ll live forever if it reaches just the right niche. It’s the kind of film people internalize and revisit when they’re having a rough day, or a rough life, or a rough whatever.
Chris Cooper is here too, a late entry into the cast, like a kindly Harry Lime. He plays Macy’s brother and they have a tenderness that balances their icy, loveless marriage way back in “American Beauty.” They’re much more interesting actors when they don’t have to be completely stifled. They’re feeling everything and they’ve got so much regret and they almost let it break them until, at nearly the last minute, they come to their senses.
“Everything’s Going to Be Great” is a film about a family from Oz that’s forced to move to Kansas, living a life of fantasy and then crashing into harsh reality. It turns out everyone kinda hates it, whether that’s where they belong or not. Life isn’t meant to be dull, it’s meant to be lived out loud, and no matter how much the Smarts resist Macy’s insistence on going to church, once they’re there, they’re going to find something that reminds them of Broadway.
As I take my last breaths, since I was shot — as you may recall —right in the feels, I’m grateful for movies like “Everything’s Going to Be Great.” The unassuming movies, the ones about big people who never hit the big time, the little miracles that pop their little heads out from the heap of expensive claptrap and cheap sludge. Not that there’s anything wrong with expensive claptrap and cheap sludge. The clap-trappers and sludge-mongers are just like the Smarts, doing their best, making it work, hoping to live up to whoever inspired them. But it’s films like this that stick with me. It doesn’t just entertain, and doesn’t just fill time. It makes me feel fulfilled.
“Everything’s Going to Be Great” is now playing in theaters.
