For his roles in such '70s and '80s classics as Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull and Goodfellas, Robert De Niro has been revered as the master of Method Acting. But of late he has been more closely associated with animated family fare (The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Shark Tale), thrillers that failed to deliver thrills (Hide and Seek and 15 Minutes) and slow plodding dramas (City by the Sea and Men of Honor). Even his recent reunion with Al Pacino in Righteous Kill failed to spark with audiences.

For much of this decade, many De Niro-led films have neither ignited the box office nor drawn critical kudos. But there have been a few notable exceptions. As Frank, the curmudgeonly soon-to-be-father-in-law in Meet the Parents, De Niro struck gold. The sequel, Meet the Fockers, raked in almost $280M in international ticket sales. And What Just Happened? may not have drawn in big crowds but the film closed the Cannes Film Festival and De Niro’s performance as the harried and over-stressed film producer in this scathing Hollywood satire was heralded by many critics as a return to the razor-sharp form that had catapulted him to fame.

Now De Niro delivers a finely tuned performance of subtle comedy and pathos in Everybody’s Fine, an English-language reworking of Giuseppe Tornatore’s 1990 film Stanno tutti bene. As Frank Goode, a retired factory worker who has recently been widowed, De Niro is a father who feels a growing sense of alienation from his own children. He spends his hours puttering around the house, keeping an immaculately mowed lawn and maintaining his garden’s flowerbeds. But when he invites his two sons and two daughters to a weekend barbeque and all four cancel at the last minute, he decides — against the advice of his doctor — to pay each of them a surprise visit.

Arriving in New York, Frank tries to locate his son David, a struggling artist whose last known address is a crumbling, dank walk-up. A nearby gallery displays one of David’s Cubist inspired portraits in its front window, but he is nowhere to be found. Frank’s daughter, Amy (Kate Beckinsale) is a high-powered advertising executive who lives in a sprawling ultra-modern, clinical home in a Chicago suburb. She has little time to spare for her father and seems eager to send him onto her brother Robert (Sam Rockwell) in Denver.  Robert, it turns out, is not an orchestra conductor as Frank had been led to believe by his late wife, but a percussionist. Father and son try to connect but unspoken tensions simmer beneath the surface. Vivacious and outgoing, Rosie (Drew Barrymore) welcomes Frank into a spacious condo unit with sweeping views of Las Vegas, but he soon suspects that she is not a successful dancer and the apartment is not where she lives. At second glance, it appears little is fine in the lives of Frank’s children.

In the Italian original, the role of the pater familias was played by Fellini fave Marcello Mastroianni. "I only saw the original film once," De Niro tells us. "It is a different type of movie. I love Mastroianni. Since I was a kid, I always watched his movies. He’s done great films, a lot of great characters in the tradition (of Italian cinema). The structure was there but it was totally different."

For British director Kirk Jones, whose directorial debut Waking Ned Devine won critical accolades for its charming blend of comedy and drama, writing the script from a pre-existing European film for an American audience provided a unique challenge. "In this version Robert De Niro’s character comes to accept his family for who they are and he accepts that there are truths that his wife hid from him. In Giuseppe’s version, Mastroianni never really accepted it."  Jones felt it was important for a modern audience to see a father realize that while perhaps not everything is ideal, he is nevertheless able to accept his children, despite the fact that they may have fallen short of his ideals for them.

The project was set in motion when one morning Jones sat down to watch a DVD of Stanno tutti bene which had been sent to him. "I just felt very connected with it," Jones says. "It struck me that the theme of the family, perhaps only second to that of love, is possibly one of the most universal things that you could hope to find. I actually related to it in relation to my family, and I thought audiences would hopefully be able to relate to the relationship with the parents or brothers and sisters or the children."

Jones, however, doesn’t regard his movie as a 'family film'. "I consider this to be a movie about family, and that is really what interested me…I started talking to people about the project and I would say that a quarter of them were emotionally quite moved." When the director started discussing his film with actors, technicians and others, he said many were visibly touched with emotion when discussing their relationships with their parents. "(Many) came up to me and said 'I know my parents aren’t proud of me. I absolutely know that is a fact.' And they would get quite emotional when they talked about it. I started to realize that it was about family and the very complex emotions that exist within the family. It occurred to me that the dynamics and relationships in a family are very rarely dealt with in films."