Wim Wenders wasn’t the first director to liberate 3D from blockbusters and animation (his countryman Werner Herzog beat him to it with Cave of Forgotten Dreams) but his 2011 dance documentary Pina remains one of the most sensual experiments in that format. His reasons for sticking with it in Every Thing Will Be Fine, however, are not immediately apparent.
This is an intimate drama where the action takes place in living rooms, offices, cafes and cars. When there is an explosive incident, it tends to be shunted off-screen. The closest that the use of 3D comes to the spectacular is the shot of a kitchen curtain fluttering in the foreground, revealing autumnal fields stretching into the distance as far as the earth will allow.
But that’s the point. 3D is used here for spatial and emotional disorientation. The chasm separating a face from its reflection, or two soon-to-be estranged lovers from one another, appears almost infinite.
James Franco plays Tomas, a novelist whose blameless involvement in a road accident has serious consequences for everyone around him. After recovering from an overdose, he breaks up with his partner, Sara (Rachel McAdams). Kate (Charlotte Gainsbourg), an illustrator, is consumed with grief at the death of her eldest child in the accident. Her young son is left to carry some hefty emotional baggage with him into adolescence.
The plot makes faltering leaps forward in time (first four years, then another four, then two) which allow Wenders and his screenwriter, Bjorn Olaf Johannessen, to draw out satisfying thematic patterns; the downside is that the audience has to keep mentally readjusting to new configurations of characters apparently immune to ageing. The film is strewn with lost or parentless children; Tomas, who is unable to have any of his own, finds that two have wandered uninvited into his life. In the most bizarre scene, he ratifies this proxy parenthood by handling a peculiar sort of bed-wetting.
Franco bears all this with sleepy good grace and doesn’t overdo the brooding, despite playing a man who has never met a window out of which he didn’t want to stare pensively. Gainsbourg isn’t given much to do; most of it is so over-familiar that there seems every danger she will react to the loss of her child by decamping to a woodland cabin to perform a self-clitoridectomy à la Antichrist.
This would be an easy film to mock. Johannessen’s script is often leaden while Wenders’s style is unfashionably unflashy, the pace only just this side of ponderous. But the picture has sincerity on its side, as well as the nagging eeriness of a score (by Alexandre Desplat) that verges on the Herrmann-esque. And while it’s tasteful, even unadventurous, Every Thing Will Be Fine isn’t too timid to address the restorative effect of trauma on creativity. “Your books from before the accident weren’t as good,” someone tells Tomas in one of several authentic “ouch” moments.
