‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ Review: An Earnest Shambles

“Everything’s Going to Be Great” is one of those movie titles that should have been ditched after the script attached to it was sold. It’s a title you can’t remember, one that feels too long because it voices a sentiment that’s too vague. (The one thing it lets you know is that everything that happens in the film probably isn’t going to be great. Not exactly a ringing invitation.)

The movie fully lives down to that title. “Everything’s Going to Be Great” is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it. Set in 1989, it’s about a family of four whose members keep piling into their beat-up station wagon to travel from one town to the next, all because the parents are regional theater producers. They have to go where the work is. But wait a minute, you say. Isn’t regional theater produced…locally? That’s the first thing about the movie that’s fuzzy and unsatisfying.

The second thing is that each of the four main characters seems to have stepped out of a different movie. The father, Buddy Smart (Bryan Cranston), is the clan’s second-rate crackpot visionary, a cockeyed optimist who dresses in fuddy-duddy jackets and never knows where the next paycheck is coming from. But that’s all right, because he loves the theater and he loves the randomness of his life. You could say that Buddy lives like a bohemian, except that he’s not an artist; he’s a producer. He’s got a mustache with the ends waxed, and that one slight Rip Taylor eccentricity captures his carny-barker spirit. When his wife, Macy (Allison Janney), complains that they can’t pay the bills, he says, “We are so rich in so many ways.” He’s the one who keeps insisting they should stop worrying because everything’s going to be great.

Buddy and Macy fight about money, and that’s but one of their big differences. Macy, we learn, comes from Kansas and has never let go of the small-town Christian girl inside. She keeps pressuring Buddy to go to church, which he refuses to do. So how did they even wind up together? She was young, Buddy was breezing through town, and they got married a week after they met. But they still seem like they’re from different planets.

That goes double for their sons. Les (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), who’s in middle school, is a total theater kid: addicted to the stage, unapologetically gay, given to having fantasy conversations with idols like Noel Coward and Ruth Gordon and Tallulah Bankhead, who pop up in the movie to counsel him. He has to deal with the intense homophobia of Middle America in the late ’80s, but at least he knows who he is — a kid who looks like he stepped out of “Glee” by way of “Footloose.” He’s the nominal hero of the movie, and there are moments when you wish that “Everything’s Going to Be Great” could just be a gay coming-of-age film, a theater-bug “Perks of Being a Wallflower.”

But the film isn’t convincing enough to do that. Les’s older brother, Derrick (Jack Champion), is everything — literally everything — Les is not: a handsome straight-arrow football jock who couldn’t have less of an interest in the theater. That seems plausible enough, except that the movie never stops italicizing his bland “normality.” The Venn-diagram overlap of these teenage siblings is…zero. Which is the sort of thing that happens not in life but on sitcoms.

“Everything’s Going to Be Great” is one of those glorified sitcoms pretending to be a real movie. It’s dotted with wacky indie comedy, like the opening scene in which Buddy, Les, and a school principal discuss whether Les is repelled by vaginas, or Buddy and Les’s morning ritual of standing on their front lawn and playing the bagpipes. The “joke” is how much this irritates Macy, but all we can think is: Who would play the bagpipes in a suburban neighborhood early in the morning? On the road, the family (or, at least, everyone but Derrick) does cringe sing-alongs of “One” from “A Chorus Line” and “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

Yet “Everything’s Going to Be Great” lacks the slick proficiency and comic precision of “Little Miss Sunshine,” a film it was clearly influenced by. The movie was directed by Jon S. Baird (“Tetris”), from a script by Steven Rogers, who wrote “I, Tonya” (which I loved), but he also wrote (or co-wrote) a handful of cheesy bad movies from the ’90s and 2000s (like “Stepmom” and “Hope Floats” and “Kate & Leopold” and “P.S. I Love You”), and this is a film by that Steven Rogers. The movie is slipshod; it’s full of half-baked arcs and ideas that don’t fully hang together.   

For an actor as great as he is, Bryan Cranston seems drawn, at times, to a certain cornball broadness. He makes Buddy likable in a brash way, though his performance is mostly a nimble piece of kitsch. But then something unexpectedly serious happens. Macy winds up leading the family back to Kansas, where they move into a farmhouse with Macy’s grizzled estranged brother (Chris Cooper), and the whole quirky-theater-world-vs.mainstream-America setup gets thrown into even more high relief. Allison Janney, in this role, is by turns warm, prickly, deluded, and officious. I never totally bought Macy’s romantic betrayal of Buddy, and I also didn’t buy it when she ditches out of the five-year contract they’ve landed to produce shows in Milwaukee, because her decision makes no financial sense. Yet “Everything’s Going to Be Great” is the sort of film that asks you to roll with whatever happens, the more capricious the better, as if that somehow made it “real.”