Watch 'A Family Affair' or just send 200 shrug emojis
Netflix
“Like, what if your boss was a movie star and he dated your mom?” isn’t actually much of a premise for a movie. Even though it’s the second effort this summer (following “The Idea of You”) in which a younger male heartthrob connects with an older woman, “A Family Affair” reeks of a general pitch meeting that forgot to further develop the storyline. The result is lazy, lifeless mush that finally answers, “What if a Hallmark Christmas movie tripped onto Netflix in late June?”
Reuniting after “The Paperboy” and looking roughly like a rock formation dating a flower, Zac Efron (usually underrated and recently very good in “The Iron Claw”) and Nicole Kidman have all the chemistry of two actors whose characters were never finished and have been told to coast in any direction that feels entirely inoffensive. He’s blandly named movie star Chris Cole and she’s successful author and widow Brooke Harwood, mother to Chris’ frustrated assistant Zara (Joey King), who has seen Chris repeatedly break hearts and doesn’t want her mom added to the list of casualties. The problem is that first-time writer Carrie Solomon and remarkably inconsistent director Richard LaGravenese (the great “The Last Five Years,” the "OK “Freedom Writers,” the horrible “P.S. I Love You”) want Chris to be as edgy as Paw Patrol and make all of his callous relationship jumping benign and vague. If Zara really had reason to fear, or if Brooke truly seemed like the person who could turn a solo artist into a duo, “A Family Affair” could be fluff that also understands its characters enough to confront complexity and develop compatibility — like the support and challenges that emerge in the seemingly lopsided partnerships of “Notting Hill” or “Long Shot.”
Instead, the main characters’ personalities only register based on where they fall on a spectrum of narcissism, which the movie both embraces and chastises without ever finding the texture of Chris and Brooke as a couple. Efron plays Chris (who’s starring in a movie that’s “Die Hard” meets “Miracle on 34th Street”) as perpetually uncomfortable, but there’s never a real sense of if he’s dumb or just misunderstood, a legitimate actor or just a chiseled cover boy, and Kidman (21 years Efron’s senior despite the movie claiming a 16-year difference) can’t figure out why Brooke sees this relationship as anything more than physical.
There will always be viewers who pop on a weak romantic comedy and delight in the lighthearted passage of time. The world surely has enough awful things happening to want to seek respite in the mildest places. But “A Family Affair” purports to convert movie love into the real thing and then just pops on glasses with hearts for frames and turns the notion of a real relationship into a corny fabrication straight out of a movie you rate with a thumbs-down in your app.
With Channing Tatum and Demi Moore, though, this might’ve been decent.
D+
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