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Everything is Not So Great

Passion for theatre is a beautiful thing and you love to see it -even on a small scale in community or youth theatre where the acting isn’t particularly good, there’s still a charm in the enthusiasm and the spirit for the work. Not long ago I experienced this with an amateur teen production of Guys and Dolls. But a love for theatre cannot be forceful, and unfortunately that is exactly how it comes across in Everything’s Going to be Great, a movie about how theatrical passion can both ruin people’s lives and give them meaning -struggling to reconcile those contradictory points.
Directed by Jon S. Baird from a script by I, Tonya’s Steven Rogers, it centres on a quirky Kansas family in the 1980s running a small local theatre company. Patriarch Buddy (Bryan Cranston) has long-nurtured dreams of working in Broadway, and his younger son Lester (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) shares his passion and aspirations, while mother Macy (Allison Janney) -a former beauty queen and devout Christian in contrast to her husband’s agnosticism- and jockish elder son Derrick (Jack Champion) help run the business and sometimes perform, but are far less invested. Nonetheless totally driven by his ambitions, Buddy spontaneously moves the family to New Jersey to run a theatre there, with the hopes of getting the opportunity to move on to a bigger venue in Milwaukee -the friction and fallout of this choice comes to effect the family drastically.
The film wears proudly on its sleeve its classic theatrical references. The family sing from The Pirates of Penzance while on the road; we see glimpses of performances of Fiddler on the Roof and Hello Dolly. Most notably Lester, whose perception of the world is entirely shaped by theatre, has visions of legends like Noel Coward, Ruth Gordon, and Tallulah Bankhead coming to give him advice. In one scene to ward off a bully making homophobic assumptions of him, he retaliates with lines from his only reference point: Hair, complete with nude apparitions of those characters encouraging him. The scenes are cute if you know the caricatures, though occasionally belie only a passing awareness of these figures, but there is something obnoxious as well -in how Lester’s narration introduces each of them and their dates, and how he seems to refuse to understand the difference between these imagined conversations and reality. It is never suggested this is a serious problem for him in other aspects of his life.
Lester is something of an issue. Ainsworth, known to Canadians for his titular role in the sitcom Son of a Critch, has experience playing precocious kids -but his approach to this one, or else his direction from Baird, emphasizes an obtuse single-mindedness in his every social interaction. He is certainly unduly punished by his surroundings: a Christian school that reprimands him with a parental visit for saying that God isn’t real, and presumptions made routinely -and often derisively about him being gay. But he also just has a naturally abrasive personality, easy to get on people’s nerves though easier to rein in. Outside of his father he does genuinely seem to not care about anybody, and the movie addresses this attitude as more a harmless quirk than honest character flaw.
Everybody in this dysfunctional family is awful though in their own way, with the possible exception of Macy's brother Walter (Chris Cooper), who for a time they are forced to live with. Derrick is a single-minded bully to his brother and a sleaze. Buddy -in spite of the charismatic exuberance of Cranston's performance, which keeps the film watchable for a time- is irresponsible and willfully ignorant to his family's needs and interests outside of theatre. And Macy, in spite of her religiosity, commits a sin that lingers in its aftermath and isn't mitigated even by sympathetic explanation. The movie attempts to take seriously these issues, especially in light of some dark plot developments, but never manages them well. 
Particularly in the back half of the movie, characterized by consequences and bitterness on the part of the whole family, the script makes some very baffling choices with regards to character growth, or a lack thereof. There's a beat where Lester manipulating his mother is framed as a virtuous thing, while her own blind faith and emotional distance towards her children is never interrogated even as we are told to empathize with her and her situation. Derrick's minute arc involves being sexually rewarded for crass behaviour towards a girl, followed by the film apparently justifying his poor treatment of Lester as indicative of some warped form of fraternal love -one of several bits of toxicity seemingly excused by the movie. Where the tone is more ardently ridiculous, this doesn't matter so much -this family can get a pass as exaggerated comic families do. But the film dives hard into personal drama and the effect is very much like if Young Sheldon attempted the same.
In and around all this are allusions to theatre and assertions of the inspirational power of it. And while the movie showcases this well in snippets, it is only ever in snippets and small bursts of exuberance in Lester’s point-of-view. The small beats where he sings to the bully or dances at school are quite cheesy, but they engage at least a little with that love of theatre beyond the surface, which otherwise seems to be unattractively linked to his air of condescension. Indeed, it is sometimes hard to ascertain whether this movie loves theatre or is dismayed with it -Baird goes back and forth, but either attitude feels superficial play-acting as nuanced. There is a note of earnestness in the ending as there is in the beginning, but it still feels like little effort was organically made to arrive there.
Everything’s Going to be Great, as its title indicates, opines a sense of optimism in spite of the difficulties this family endures. And it is reiterated for Lester specifically and his dreams of making it big in theatre. I do appreciate that the movie doesn’t answer this notion definitively -that we don’t see the fruits of Lester’s passion fully realized by the future. But in light of this film’s story and character choices, it is impossible to not also take that statement as an absolution of actions and attitudes in the moment. If everything’s going to be great, why dwell on issues in the present? The film just in general is a bit smug in this, good intentions notwithstanding, and makes no compelling argument for the validity of these virtues against real trials and disaffection. It’s great that Lester loves theatre, it’s fine his family do not -they shouldn’t have to make it a problem for everyone.

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