It’s been a rough decade for Robert De Niro. The two-time Oscar winner and star of American classics like “Taxi Driver,” “The Deer Hunter” and “Raging Bull” has lately lent his talents to fare like “Showtime,” “Godsend,” “Meet the Fockers” and last year’s abominable “Righteous Kill.”

It’s been rougher for audiences than for him — at least’s he’s picking up a paycheck for his trouble.

But with almost all of his acting credibility cashed in, De Niro is now finally making an appearance in the most dignified lead role he’s had in a while in “Everybody’s Fine.”

It’s too bad he’s surrounded by a soppy, sniveling disappointment of a film that aims for emotional power, but lands somewhere in the realm of maudlin silliness.

A remake of the Italian film “Stanno tutti bene,” directed by the very capable Giuseppe Tornatore (“Cinema Paradiso”), “Everybody’s Fine” is helmed by Kirk Jones (“Nanny McPhee”) and stars De Niro as Frank Goode, a recent widower who wants to get all his kids around the same table for Thanksgiving dinner. Last minute excuses arrive instead of the children.

Frank has an unidentified lung condition from making PVC coating for telephone wires all his life, but lazy screenwriting tic be damned, he’s going to pay a surprise visit to his four kids at their homes flung around the country in hopes of a Christmas reunion.

His youngest son, David (Austin Lysy, “Hitch”), is an artist living in New York City, but isn’t home when he calls, so Frank treks along to see his advertising exec daughter Amy (Kate Beckinsale, “Whiteout”), his musician son Robert (Sam Rockwell, “Moon”) and his dancer daughter Rosie (Drew Barrymore, “Whip It”).

Each one shuffles their dad through the perfunctory visit routine before ushering him off to his next destination. They’re not being rude; they just have a secret about David they don’t think their dad can handle.

Each child has some secrets of their own as well, and despite Frank’s conception of his children as happy, successful people, that’s not really the case.

The message of “Everybody’s Fine” — that it takes more than fake smiles and conflict-free relationships to make a happy family — is an honorable one, but the film feels the need to telegraph its points loud and often with two-dimensional characters acting out obvious deceptions. The real-life deceptions are rarely this clear-cut.

This does no favors to Beckinsale, Rockwell or Barrymore, who are all stunted by their carefully constructed plot points and never really achieve any emotional gravitas, even next to De Niro.

De Niro too gets hung up by the script at times, but it explores his character much more thoroughly, giving us an aging man with a quiet desperation and an earnest, if not very aware, love for his children. De Niro’s quiet, subtle performance is always interesting and occasionally moving.

Still, “Everybody’s Fine” undoes its own very small successes with an ending that’s meant to appeal to the Christmas audiences, and is as neatly tied up as a Christmas present. The emotional power is in understanding that family is still important even though there can be plenty wrong with it, but there’s no room for anything to be left wrong in this movie.

De Niro’s modest return to form aside, there’s no reason for a film like “Everybody’s Fine” to exist in a world where the story of a recently widowed man’s re-discovery of his family has been told much more eloquently and truthfully in Alexander Payne’s “About Schmidt.”