Everybody's Fine.

Giuseppe Tornatore, who made the insufferably sentimental Oscar-winner Cinema Paradiso, is back with Everybody's Fine (Stanno tutti bene), starring Marcello Mastroianni as Matteo, a 74-year-old retired civil servant in Sicily, who talks to his dead wife, Angela, as though she were still alive. Films whose protagonists conduct dialogues with the dead constitute a subgenre to be shunned.

Matteo's five grown sons and daughters lead busy, ostensibly thriving, lives on the mainland, and have no time for papa. He puts up beachside bungalows for their summer holidays, but the disgraziati don't even bother to call-never mind write-to say they can't make it. Still self-deluded, Matteo resolves to travel north and surprise them in their five respective cities. The film thus becomes a meditation on a hustling, desperate, confused, and dissembling Italy.

In Naples, son Alvaro is nowhere to be found, barely even in the computer of the university where he teaches; only his phone answering machine dispenses ghostly messages. In Rome, son Canio pretends to be a serious political contender, but is actually a lowly Communist Party hack. A mugger robs Matteo and smashes the camera containing the pictures the old man has promised Angela he'd bring back for her. Still, his obsession to reunite his family around a dinner table continues unabated. In Florence, the beautiful Tosca (Matteo, an opera lover, has given all his children operatic names) is not a successful actress, but mostly a model for pornoid cameras; her elegant apartment is really her ex-lover's, who wants it back; the baby of a friend, which Tosca looks after, is really, albeit illegitimately, her own.

Matteo doesn't cotton on to any of this. He journeys on to Milan, and meets on the train an exquisite older woman Michele Morgan, as fine as ever), has a sweetly melancholy time with her, and ignores her advice to give up on his children as she has on hers. He travels on alone, congratulating himself on having remained, as he puts it, faithful to Angela. In Milan, Guglielmo is not a successful concert artist, but a humble percussionist in a marginal orchestra. His 15-year-old son, at least, is unevasive enough to admit getting his girlfriend pregnant. In Turin, Norma is not the big phone-company executive, but a mere telephone operator, her marriage a shambles. At the festive dinner Matteo throws for all in Rome, only Canio and Guglielmo show up, and finally admit their cover-up: Alvaro has actually committed suicide-something Matteo can't bring himself to believe.

The point here-conveyed in part through flashbacks, dreams, fantasies-is that Matteo (Italy) won't face the truth even when hit in the face by it. The story, if it weren't so mechanistic, might just barely work, but the attempt to revivify it with mildly surrealist touches and faintly absurdist humor merely reminds us how much not only such stories, but also the strategies for their updating, have aged and paled.

Aged, too, has poor Mastroianni, whose very real charm now seems a bit sweaty under the collar. The supporting cast is undistinguished, although Valeria Cavali, as Tosca, is quietly enchanting. Tomatore's dialogue, on which everybody's perennial collaborator, Tonino Guerra, duly collaborated, is routine stuff, not helped by Blasco Giurato's boilerplate cinematography. Another very old hand, Ennio Morricone, managed some still respectable, but by now second-best, background music. Sad.