‘Everything’s Going to Be Great’ Review: Jon S. Baird’s Gratingly Overstuffed Family Dramedy

Jon S. Baird’s family dramedy Everything’s Going to Be Great makes an impassioned plea to hopeless optimists everywhere to love and care for anyone with a wild dream—the people who know who they are and will do anything to find the place where they can be just that. That’s lovely and heartwarming if you’re making The Muppet Movie and the majority of your cast consists of giddily self-aware felt misfits buoying those emotions. But it’s more than a little irritating when it’s a family of flesh-and-blood but sitcom-grade theater weirdos.

Said family includes Buddy (Bryan Cranston), a wild-eyed regional theater director, Macy (Allison Janney), his pragmatic bookkeeper wife, and their son Lester (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), an unapologetically gay theater snob in training. Buddy and Macy’s older son, Derrick (Jack Champion), is the only normie in a family that spends their weekends playing dueling bagpipes in their backyard, and that’s them at their most endearing.

There’s a sense that this family is an elaborately constructed artifice, and that might have worked if the world around them had been designed to call attention to that. But Baird is no Wes Anderson. His direction is warm and sincere and sympathetic. The human struggles at play are too dire and relatable for us to say that these people don’t deserve that level of grace, but making the audience generally sympathize with them doesn’t make spending time with them—even for a comparatively brief 95 minutes—particularly pleasant either.

Buddy, with his carny mustache and arm-flailing exuberance, is chasing his high-minded dream of directing regional theater, which has him dragging his patient family along with him to whatever place will have him. Every move means the family must re-establish themselves, sustained only by Buddy endlessly repeating the eponymous mantra that “everything’s going to be great.” This is far from the first film to center on a character trying to justify their artistic freedom at the expense of common sense, but it doesn’t clear the hurdle of making the audience understand why Buddy’s dream is so appealing to him.

Elsewhere, Lester is essentially a 14-year-old Truman Capote wannabe, viciously catty to everyone except for Tallulah Bankhead (Laura Benanti) and William Inge (David MacLean). Yes, film and stage star Tallulah Bankhead and playwright and novelist William Inge, both of whom Lester imagines and has conversations with because he has no actual friends. Given the weirdness of this subplot, it’s easy to imagine the possibly better film that had been all about him, but Everything’s Going to Be Great settles for swinging between underlining the almost surreal weirdness of Buddy and Lester and how Derrick stands in opposition to them.

For her part, Macy is a bored and—by her own admission—boring housewife whose lingering Midwestern faith in God and a mistake of an affair with a debonair actor named Kyle (Simon Rex) puts her on the outside of her family in a different way than Derrick is. Her motivations are understandable, but her character is written far too thin to make her more than a stale archetype, despite Janney at least bringing undeniable heart to the role.

As for Derrick, all he wants is to play football and lose his virginity, but he’s stuck with an albatross of a family that keeps forcing him to move and try out for the lamest musicals imaginable. He’s the only character here that comes close to feeling like a real person, perhaps because the film is most convincing at keying us to his feelings of estrangement, even if it doesn’t run with that. An entire film could have been built around Derrick’s struggle to get away from his family, which might have allowed viewers to fully give their sympathies to him.