Everybody in Our Family is a new Romanian film directed by Radu Jude, who also penned the screenplay along with Corina Sabau. It\u2019s about a divorced man who arrives to pick up his five year old daughter for a pre-arranged weekend visit, only to find his ex-wife not home and his mother-in-law and the man who\u2019s replaced him in his wife\u2019s life refusing to let him have his daughter because they claim she\u2019s ill. When the wife gets home, police are called and matters get out of hand (you know, sort of like that fire started by O\u2019Leary\u2019s cow getting out of hand). <\/p>\n
Have you ever been at a restaurant or coffee shop and a couple at a nearby table is having a knock down, drag out? You can\u2019t look away, but at the same time, you have no context for the argument so nothing they say really makes enough sense or gives you the information you need to understand the conflict. So in the end, the whole thing becomes just kind of uncomfortable and embarrassing. That\u2019s what watching this Eastern European Kramer v. Kramer is like. It\u2019s a series of arguments and actions presented without enough of that all important context to really have an emotional stake in what\u2019s going on. <\/p>\n
Everybody in Our Family is very sincere (that\u2019s one thing you can definitely say about it) and no one gives a bad performance, but it has little else to really recommend it. From a pacing standpoint, it feels a bit clunky (it takes forever for the other shoe to drop\u2014we call it the inciting incident in screenplay patois) and then when the central character makes a fateful decision toward the end, it\u2019s so fateful, there\u2019s no place for the movie to go, and worse yet, it takes forever not to go there. It\u2019s so fateful, and dramatized in such an over the top way (a few times, the characters tell the others to stop acting like they\u2019re in a soap opera, which is something one wishes someone had told the writers and director) there\u2019s no satisfactory way this movie could resolve itself. And sure enough, the authors paint themselves into such a corner that the whole thing ends, well, unsatisfactorily. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Everybody in Our Family is a new Romanian film directed by Radu Jude, who also penned the screenplay along with Corina Sabau. It\u2019s about a divorced man who arrives to pick up his five year old daughter for a pre-arranged weekend visit, only to find his ex-wife not home and his mother-in-law and the man […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[158,156,157],"series":[],"class_list":["post-1027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-corina-sabau","tag-everybody-in-our-family","tag-radu-jude"],"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/www.rumblespoon.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/REAL-Short-Box-New-Logo-FINAL-scaled.jpg","download_link":"","player_link":"","audio_player":false,"episode_data":{"playerMode":"dark","subscribeUrls":{"amazon":{"key":"amazon","url":"","label":"Amazon","class":"amazon","icon":"amazon.png"}},"rssFeedUrl":"https:\/\/www.rumblespoon.com\/wp\/feed\/podcast\/the-real-short-box","embedCode":"
Movie Review of EVERYBODY IN OUR FAMILY by Howard Casner<\/a><\/blockquote>