Hollywood’s favourite habit of coincidentally releasing two films with the same premise near back to back has returned with Netflix’s A Family Affair. It’s a romcom about the single mother of a daughter, who falls in lust with a much younger, intimidatingly famous man. This is also exactly how you’d describe Prime Video’s recent, Anne Hathaway-fronted The Idea of You. Unfortunately, A Family Affair is the inferior of the two. It’s one of those Netflix productions that feels both under and overproduced, touting major stars (here, Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, and Joey King) while being shot and scored like an ad for a depression medication. Side effects may vary.
Kidman stars as widow and lapsed screenwriter Brooke Harwood, whose daughter Zara (King) is the harried assistant to actor Chris Cole (Efron), an amalgamation of the Hollywood Chrises (Evans, Hemsworth, Pine, Pratt). The magazines say he has “the world’s greatest abs”, he’s appeared on an episode of Hot Ones, and he’s currently stuck on the third instalment of a mortifyingly bad superhero franchise.
Zara, fed up, quits. But when Chris turns up at her house to apologise for his bad behaviour, he instead finds her mother, who immediately seduces him through her intimate knowledge of the ancient Greek myth of the Minotaur (as someone who frequently uses this tactic, I can assure you it does not actually work). Zara discovers them in flagrante delicto. Naturally, she’s furious and embarrassed. Chris is a serial womaniser, and she’s been forced to watch him love bomb and betray a whole series of beautiful women. Chris, however, swears that this time is different.
Meanwhile, two of the film’s only non-white cast members are Zara’s far more interesting friends (played by YouTuber Liza Koshy and Joy Ride’s Sherry Cola). They exist only so that the white lead can pointedly neglect them and then learn a lesson from it.
The problem is that no one’s really agreed on what A Family Affair is supposed to be beyond the concept of a relationship, a pair of white lies, and a third-act misunderstanding. Richard LaGravenese’s direction and Carrie Solomon’s script fail to bridge the gap between, for example, the nonsensical and somewhat bad-taste joke about Stevie Wonder and the multiple conversations about dead relatives. It certainly has none of the breezy, relaxed maturity of The Idea of You. And none of its chemistry, either.
There are no bad performances here per se, but there are misaligned ones. Efron is in broad comedy, himbo mode (which he does well, and earnestly). King, once the star of Netflix’s Kissing Booth series, has reverted to that familiar, emphatic style of teen movie acting. Kidman’s just there for a good time. But she’s exactly the kind of talent who can cut loose and maintain composure – even when she’s doing the silliest of romcoms, she melts into her lines with a sort of casual seductiveness that takes most people about three glasses of wine to build up the confidence to achieve.
Efron and Kidman have been good together on screen before, in 2012’s seedy, Floridian crime story The Paperboy. But, here, the only natural chemistry she seems to share is with Kathy Bates, in the role of her dead husband’s mother. A Family Affair could, at one time, have at least sold itself on the originality of its premise – but with that snatched out from under it, all that’s left is an afterthought.
Dir: Richard LaGravenese. Starring: Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Joey King, Liza Koshy, Sherry Cola, Kathy Bates. 12, 113 mins.
‘A Family Affair’ is streaming on Netflix
