‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ Review: A Shamelessly Manipulative Dramedy
While Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney give somewhat impassioned performances, Jon S. Baird can’t follow up the same momentum he built with Tetris in his latest motion picture, Everything’s Going to Be Great.
After the incredible fun of Tetris, it was easy to eagerly anticipate what director Jon S. Baird would tackle next. The Scottish filmmaker is one of our most underappreciated working today and has solidified himself as a talent to watch, even if his projects go by (mostly) unnoticed. That’s why, when Lionsgate announced that his latest effort, Everything’s Going to Be Great, would not be released wide and instead dumped in a few cinemas with little to no fanfare, I wasn’t entirely worried.
However, after viewing the picture, one can see why the studio was not as confident in giving Baird the same level of admiration he had in his previous body of work. The film, which is divided into two halves, starts out promisingly by building a compelling familial relationship between Buddy (Bryan Cranston), his wife Macy (Allison Janney) and their children Lester (Benjamin Ean Ainsworth) and Derrick (Jack Champion). We learn that they travel around the country, accepting regional theater gigs to make ends meet.
One day, after acclimating themselves to their new region, Buddy receives the opportunity of a lifetime, an offer too good to refuse at face-value. He nonetheless accepts and brings his family with him. This is the bulk of the first half of the movie. And while it is not particularly memorable, it at least develops interesting connections the audience can have with Buddy and his family, as they follow the individual narratives of each character. Lester has high aspirations to become as passionate in theater as his dad, while Derrick wants nothing to do with the profession and prefers to focus on football, as removed as he possibly can from his parents.
Meanwhile, Buddy’s marriage with Macy isn’t as clear-cut as it seems, as the two are facing problems they don’t want to keep head-on. Macy is having an affair with one of her colleagues, Kyle (Simon Rex), which causes some friction between herself and Lester, who discovers of their relationship coincidentally. At that point, one can imagine the direction a movie like this will go, but it doesn’t necessarily matter, since Cranston and Janney do mostly rock-solid work in pulling us into its relatively simple story, and keeping us semi-engaged at almost every turn.
However, by the halfway point of the movie, something immensely tragic occurs, which turns this otherwise serviceable movie into a purely repulsive and shamelessly manipulative affair. Without spoiling a thing, the succession of melodrama that unfolds in the span of five minutes feels worthy of Tyler Perry’s worst instincts, and the impact is thus blunted whenever the most significant moment happens and shifts the story in a completely different direction than we envisioned. It leads the family to travel to Macy’s father (played by Chris Cooper, an always welcome screen presence) and rebuild anew, hoping that what awaits the family on the other side will be more fruitful than their current state.
The rest of the movie is an absolute nightmare to sit through, from shifting character motivations that go absolutely nowhere, to the performances that take a massive dip in quality. It all becomes stultifying and pitifully uninteresting, especially during its back half, where the most saccharine emotions are in full display. None of it works, and the film itself feels like a completely different object than what came before.
It is, of course, a massive swing to give the audience something as unexpected as this plot development, but it’s treated in such an ill-conceived way that it immediately leaves a bad taste in the mouth and discourages us from watching the rest of the picture. Moreover, the narrative choices screenwriter Steven Rogers makes are completely nonsensical, especially regarding Macy’s affair, a major moment that gets overshadowed by tragedy and is immediately dropped and never mentioned again as soon as we shift to something much darker.
And, despite engaging supporting turns from both Champion and Ainsworth, the film itself never gives much development on their characters and prefers to box them inside one egregious cliché after the next, with no desire to surpass them. It results in a maudlin affair that fizzles out so quickly one wonders why we’re sticking to it when there are arguably better, more impactful, movies than this one treating the exact same subject matter and thematic beats as Baird’s film, despite solid work from its cast of star-studded actors and naturalistic photography from Mark Wolf, which gives some texture to the movie.
It is difficult to discuss some of the film’s most problematic aspects without spoiling the moment that derails the entire thing, but the sad truth is that Baird could’ve gotten away with such a moment and made it all the more resonant if he didn’t treat it the way Tyler Perry does in his dramas, without an ounce of subtlety and desperate to make the audience cry at every turn. This occurs during the midpoint of Everything’s Going to Be Great, and while its intentions are more benevolent than Perry’s oeuvre, Baird unfortunately can’t rise up to the shoddy material written and turns what is right now his first (and hopefully only) miss.