Movie Review – A Family Affair (2024)
Principal Cast : Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Joey King, Liza Koshy, Kathy Bates.
Synopsis: A surprising romance kicks off comic consequences for a young woman, her mother and her movie star boss as they face the complications of love, sex, and identity.
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Despite boasting a solid cast, there’s almost nothing noteworthy or memorable about Netflix’ attempt to capitalise on the star power of Nicole Kidman in this cringeworthy, awkwardly written and spectacularly idiotic “romantic comedy” that lacks both romance or comedy, resulting in a nightmarish triangle of angst for the three lead actors. Zac Efron doesn’t have to prove he’s a really good actor when given the right material (this isn’t the right material) and as a leading man love interest in major Hollywood projects he’s arguably among the more amenable. So too is Joey King, a young actress who has slugged through the hard-yards of The Kissing Booth franchise and a weird medieval John Wick-riff in The Princess to achieve a modicum of critical praise, only to run aground with what can easily be best described as a performance for the ages in the worst possible way here. A Family Affair is an execrable affair indeed, and one worth dissecting if only to try and understand what the filmmakers of this drivel were attempting to do.
Young Zara Ford (King) works as a personal assistant to Hollywood action superstar Chris Cole (Efron), an arrogant, superficial and petulant boss who makes Zara’s life a living hell with endless demands of increasing stupidity. After quitting her job, Zara returns home to her mother, popular magazine writer Brooke Harwood (Kidman), whereupon Cole follows her to convince her to come back to work. Upon meeting Brooke, Cole is smitten and strikes up an unlikely romance with the older woman, much to the horror of Zara, who continues to give Chris one more chance as her boss. Even the protestations of Zara’s friend Eugenie (Liza Koshy) and the reflective summations of her grandmother Leila (Kathy Bates) can’t assuage the fears of Zara for her lovestruck mother, knowing all to well Cole’s propensity for falling out of love with the many women in his life as he falls into it.
For a film purporting to be a funny romp, A Family Affair is almost an affront to comedy – it’s an anti-comedy, inasmuch as it’s destitute any genuine laughs, cannot find a specific tone to save itself, and baffles even the staunchest Nicole Kidman fan into questioning why the popular actress took this thankless role. Having the older Kidman do a Mrs Robinson turn on Zac Efron’s buff physique might have seemed like a slam dunk multi-demographic draw for Netflix, and the addition of eternally popular Joey King probably felt like icing on a very sweet cake, but the sour taste of badly ill-judged comedic tonality and an uneven dramatic streak between the “laughs” prevents this project from achieving any kind of success. Written by Carrie Solomon, the pleasant nature of the story and bland, indifferent characters make for undemanding intellectual stimulation, but the screenplay veers between making Efron’s Chris Cole an egregious prat and a soft-focused romantic lead with the kind of clumsiness you’d expect from a low-tier film-school project. Cole and Brooke’s reason to even look at each other twice isn’t consistently drawn well enough, not to make things work in this project for sure, and while Kidman and Efron are supremely talented in almost every respect their on-screen chemistry is entirely charisma-free. No rizz, as the kids say.
The uneven comedy never works, it never clicks, and it’s problematic in the way Efron’s Chris Cole treats women to a degree I actually hated him for the majority of this film. Cole treats women as objects, a pieces of meat, constantly in and out of relationships with his only concern being his big screen career – the archetypal Hollywood douchebag, a cliché that’s as cliched as you can get in these types of films. So you’d expect him to at least learn a lesson about women or love or basic human decency at some point in this film, but the way it’s written he just… doesn’t. Efron’s just… there, hanging on for dear life in a script that flagrantly doesn’t want him to be the love interest but shoehorned into the part because… well, reasons I guess. Kidman, for her part, seems to glide through the movie without putting in a shred of effort, and her maternal character and fractious relationship with King’s Zara never gels the way the film needs it to. King shrieks her way through an over-the-top performance that mirrors the terrible writing – loud and obnoxious characters we don’t like, doing shit we don’t care for, with other people who aren’t right for them. The film attempts to make the Kidman and Efron relationship work through a series of banal interactions both before and after they nearly have sex, but with Efron being so arrogant and Kidman so indifferent you kinda just don’t care.
And why, exactly, did the great Kathy Bates sign up for this dreck? Who knows, but she’s in it for all of three scenes and looks like she’s phoning it in the whole time; this entire film feels like an afterthought, a dreary, half-baked rom-com plunged from the cobwebs of some dusty screenplay shelf in an attic somewhere that Netflix thought might be a good chuckle. Oh, they’re chuckling alright – at the folks who sat through this trash. If you squint, really let your eyes go out of focus a bit you can see the subtext of this movie is “it’s a paycheck for everyone” at our expense, and that’s as demeaning for us as it is for the actors within it. Having checked out Richard LaGravenese’s filmography as both writer and director you’d forgive him for sticking with the overly schmaltzy slop he’s fed us for since Clint Eastwood’s The Bridges Of Madison County, but in this day and age half-baked tripe just doesn’t float like it used to. A Family Affair is a dreadfully dull, problematically uneven and decidedly cringeworthy affair indeed. Painful to watch, at no point did I laugh, and at no stage did I consider any of this pap romantic.
Who wrote this?
