By Petr Navovy | Film | July 16, 2024 |
By Petr Navovy | Film | July 16, 2024 |
Once every few months, my usual healthy and regular sleep routine gets rocked by a wave of insomnia. Normally, this squall lasts just for a few days. A week at most. Recently, however, for reasons unknown, I’ve been caught in a storm that has refused to relent for a few months. As bad as this has been for my work, health, and general enjoyment of life, it was also probably, funnily enough, the best state to be in to watch A Family Affair.
A Family Affair is a Netflix film by director Richard LaGravenese (Freedom Writers, P.S. I Love You). It stars Zac Efron as vain and vacuous action movie star Chris Cole, and Joey King as Zara, his long-suffering personal assistant. Zara is an adrift member of Gen Z (I think—the film codes her with the kinds of character touches that the media used to like to do for Millennials but now that we’re aging into our bloody forties that’s getting harder and harder to do) who hopes to break into the movie business properly, but for now can’t seem to find herself escaping the limbo that is PA land.
It’s not long before this state of affairs is interrupted, however, when some long-simmering tensions between boss and employee boil over and Zara finds herself without a job. Shortly after that, Chris realises that he needs Zara more than he let on, while also in the process meeting Zara’s single mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), and as a result realising he may need…(with movie trailer voice) something else as well.
So, yes, in a nutshell, this is the movie in which Zac Efron hooks up with Nicole Kidman. Efron is 36, Kidman is 57, and that in and of itself made the story feel a little bit refreshing—even if that’s purely because of how it contrasted against the prevailing trends in our culture in which men end up hooking up with/partnering with younger/much younger women. I’m not here to make judgments or any deeper analyses than that—A Family Affair is not nearly substantial enough to warrant it—so all I will say is that I applaud the filmmakers for trying to go against the grain at least a little bit.
That is all I will applaud them for, however, as A Family Affair is a mostly forgettable bit of fluff that ludicrously goes on for an hour and fifty-four minutes, and which features one (1) genuinely funny joke in all that time, served especially well by Efron’s delivery and timing (that was spoiled entirely in the trailer). Despite all that, I came away from the film with a more positive feeling than I was expecting. Perhaps that’s because my expectations of Netflix films reside permanently at the bottom of the toilet these days, though it might also be because—as I said in the opening—I watched this film while in the grips of some pretty heavy chronic insomnia, and my scrambled brain’s critical faculties weren’t exactly operating at their peak. Who knows! It may be clutching at straws, but I will say that unlike many of its peers, A Family Affair at least had some semblance of heart and humanity underneath the anonymous filmmaking. Plus Kathy Bates is in it! Was that enough to make it good? Oh, heavens, no. Don’t be ridiculous.