Critics reviews

Wenders treats this potentially melodramatic material in a low-key style, suggesting a return to his European roots while simultaneously revealing the influence of the American auteurs he has previously declared allegiance to. The mise en scène is strikingly rich, utilizing complex patterns of imagery: a Narusian tracking shot showing Tomas's second encounter with Kate will be repeated later, with the camera moving in the opposite direction, as Tomas walks through a forest with Christopher.

Every Thing Will Be Fine is no masterpiece, but it is a return to some kind of form... Wenders's choice to film a drama of mostly interiors in 3D is something we haven't seen much of. Thus we have a movie in which each inside master shot gets separated out into a series of planes; foreground, middle ground, and background seem pasted together almost on purpose, lending everything in the film a sense of unsettled construction that dovetails the narrative's twists and turns.

Every Thing Will Be Fine is in a very real sense thematically quaint, and too often the screenplay is spectacularly verbally maladroit, not to mention vague. "Neither of us is fine … we want different things in life … I just want to write … " is the sort of thing the performers have to work with for the first half of the movie. As irritating as the commonplaces are, and as distractingly bad as the dialogue gets, glints and glimmers of perception and feeling find their way out from the 3D frame.

Every Thing Will Be Fine, ostensibly about a writer who realizes his dreams on the back of someone else's nightmare, resembles nothing more than the story of one man's decade-long quest to get some quality zzzzs. It probably couldn't ask for a more fitting star than Franco, who has eyes like the headlamps of a beat-up old Corvette Stingray, stuck halfway between open and closed.

Something is off with "Every Thing Will Be Fine." Even for a movie about a writer detached from his emotions, it's ponderous, like a lucid dream gone bad.

The director Wim Wenders's decades of artistry are hardly detectible in this melodrama, filmed in 3-D... The passing years find the characters unmarked and undeveloped; incidents follow with little inner necessity and virtually no insight into Tomas's passions or processes. The inevitable twists of suspense and dollops of sentiment lack emotional resonance, and the 3-D filming neither adds nor subtracts from images that are devoid of identity.

In fairness to the cast, even the most committed actor would struggle to make something out of the film's script, which is filled with pointless longueurs that drag out the drama while incorporating dialogue that overcompensates for these empty spaces by rushing to conclusions. This has the effect of forcing the actors to flatly announce their character arcs.

Critics have brought up the fact that this film is no Paris, Texas and that the 3D effects in character-driven melodrama are pretty unnecessary most of the time, difficult claims to disagree with, but I found I couldn't totally write the film off the way some have. I kept thinking back to the yellow stain on the mattress.

Unusually, Wenders shot the film in 3D, and though the opening, winter-set sequence sometimes suggests the way the Hollywood melodramas of 1950s used color—with Alexandre Desplat's throwback score an obvious reference to the period—he seems to run out of uses for the format by the 15-minute mark, barring a couple of Vertigo-style zoom-and-dollies peppered throughout.

This misbegotten venture apparently aspires to evoke the stylistic flair of Fifties specialists in melodrama such as Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli but ends up being merely ponderous. Shot in Quebec, apparently for no other reason than taking advantage of a tax-shelter deal, the narrative is irritatingly woolly.

It is undoubtedly a ploddingly slow cinema tribute to Douglas Sirk... but it's watchable in a way that, say, Wenders's Palermo Shooting is not... I really felt that if Wenders had sped up the camera movements a little and cut more sharply (okay, and maybe recast one of the secondary roles) he could have had something to match Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven.

The entire work is very well done and sprinkled with beautiful scenes but remains quite conventional and a bit repetitive. Once again, the heart of the film is truly the exploration of image, and yet on this level, Wenders hits the nail on the head, particularly in the way in which he develops, like he never would have been able to do in 3D, the window or transparent screen motif through which Tomas initially tries to watch out for his inspiration...