Producers: Joe Roth and Jeff Kirschenbaum Director: Richard Lagravenese Screenplay: Carrie Solomon Cast: Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Joey King, Liza Koshy, Kathy Bates, Sherry Cola and Sarah Baskin Distributor: Netflix
Grade: C
The old adage says that comedy is hard, but if recent examples are any indication, romantic comedies are especially so. “A Family Affair” tries to bring some new twists to old formulas, but sadly in this case neither the old nor the new works very well.
The guy who’s one half of the destined-to-be-together couple is Chris Cole (Zac Efron), a big action movie star who’s nonetheless lonely and scared inside, and his predetermined soul mate is Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman), a widowed writer who apparently hasn’t dated since her husband died. She’s also the mother of Zara Ford (Joey King), Chris’s put-upon assistant who, after a couple of years as a glorified gofer, has gotten sick and tired of her boss’s egotistical self-absorption and failure to keep his promises to promote her to producer status.
So she quits, occasioning Chris to visit the house where she lives with Brooke to sort-of apologize. The chemistry between Chris and Brooke is immediate—she astonishes him by explaining that his movie franchise has roots in Greek mythology, her field of expertise—and by the time Zara comes home from a shopping trip, they’re in bed together (a circumstance that, frankly, doesn’t seem remotely credible). Naturally Zara’s appalled when she interrupts them in flagrante, but her wise, manipulative paternal grandma Leila (Kathy Bates)—also Brooke’s long-time editor—intervenes to smooth the way for a romance the girl finds unpalatable.
Cole does move Zara up to producer of his new sequel, in which he plays some sort of super spy (he’s constantly referred to as a superhero, but that’s an exaggeration), and there are a few mildly amusing moments involving the movie’s intense French director (Sarah Baskin), whose instructions she occasionally she has to translate for Cole, and Stella (Sherry Cola), a writer friend whom Zara convinces Cole is a perfect choice to doctor the movie’s awful script. Overall, though, the attempts at Hollywood parody are limp. And the material involving Zara’s inevitable best friend Genie (Liza Koshy) is banal, especially in a sudden confrontation between them when Zara realizes she’s been self-absorbed in relying constantly on Genie’s help while ignoring the fact that Genie’s been having relationship problems of her own.
And the romantic spark between Kidman and Efron never takes off either; it remains a coupling that we’re told, especially through a couple of wordless montages accompanied by the sappy, tinkling score of composer Siddhartha Khosla, is made in heaven, but never convinces us that it was contrived anywhere else but in Solomon’s word processor. The two stars work to make Chris and Brooke seem combustible, though neither seems really comfortable doing so (Efron is halting and Kidman blasé), but the relationship remains artificial despite their best efforts.
So is the obstacle that, in obligatory fashion, arises in the last act to potentially derail it. With her knowledge about how her boss has ended things with his previous girlfriends, Zara concludes that he intends using the same methods with her mother; and the confrontation occurs, as you might expect, during a family Christmas celebration at a mountain lodge to which Cole has been invited. Naturally, however, things will be smoothed out in time for a happy ending in which Zara shows she’s changed her mind about Chris and her mom by creating a super-cute re-meeting for the couple.
What little spark is to be found in the blandly-titled “A Family Affair” comes from King, whose Zara might be overly frantic in sitcom style but is at least energetic, and Bates, whose unruffled delivery, always marked by a knowing smile, elevates even the most misguided material. The picture has the glossily anonymous look of much Netflix or Hallmark romcom fare; the production design (Desma Murphy), costumes (Luis Sequeira) and cinematography (Don Burgess) have a comfortable opulence, and editor Melissa Bretherton works with Richard Lagravenese’s easygoing direction to keep things cushy and predictable.
“A Family Affair” is contrived, but not clever enough to overcome the essential shallowness of the concept or the slackness of execution. Maybe Stella should have been brought on for a rewrite.