In Wim Wenders’ very earnest new film Every Thing Will Be Fine, James Franco plays a young writer, Tomas, who is involved in a fatal accident and can’t seem to decide if it has affected him badly or not. The inference one is probably expected to draw is that it has had an adverse effect but literary success follows so maybe it was not such a bad thing after all. When challenged at one point in the film about his books after the accident being better, Tomas says, in a scene that might have been culled from a daytime soap: “I’m a writer. With every book I write I hope to get a little better. That’s all there is to it.”
Wenders used to make beautifully wistful films about social misfits, nostalgia and lack of belonging. That was way back in the 1970s and 1980s. These days, a few serviceable documentaries aside, his work is of a far lower stamp. Every Thing Will Be Fine does not quite plumb the depths of his career nadir, The Million Dollar Hotel, a 2000 collaboration with Bono, but it takes itself way too seriously for such an insubstantial film. Part of the problem is Franco in the main role, who despite how much he might say it on screen, does not pass muster as a writer, and certainly not a critically acclaimed one. Franco in real life is a published author, but he is also an artist and a filmmaker, none of which he is particularly accomplished at (his two Faulkner adaptations, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, were as pointless as they were bloodless, and thankfully barely noticed by anyone). He is more campus dilettante than Renaissance Man but another problem with Every Thing Will Be Fine is that watching mournful films about writing and writers is just not much fun. Few writers in history, the good as well as the bad, have led interesting lives (as recent events have shown, they are sometimes not even very smart) and their craft is a particularly undramatic one.
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