A Family Affair (2024)
Directed by: Richard LaGravenese
Premise: A movie star (Zac Efron) begins dating his assistant’s mother (Nicole Kidman).
What Works: A Family Affair is partially a love story between an unlikely couple played by Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman. Aside from their twenty-year age difference, the two of them are very different people. He is uneducated and alone while she is bookish and connected to her family. Their contrasts are complementary and Efron and Kidman make the love story convincing. With Kidman’s character being considerably older, A Family Affair addresses the way in which older women tend to be desexualized by Hollywood; Kidman’s character is a mother and a professional writer but she is also a flesh and blood woman and she gets swept up in the romance of it all.
What Doesn’t: Not every story has to contain life and death stakes nor does every film have to be emotionally wrenching but there has to be something at risk. Characters must have some desire or goal that animates them to action and then meet resistance. A Family Affair is a big nothing of a story. The film plays like a mash up of a few different plotlines. Zara (Joey King) is the assistant to a movie star and her job is a nightmare due to the actor’s needy and selfish ways. The early part of the movie sets up a show business story of a young character struggling to start her career but then it abruptly switches to a love story. A Family Affair is essentially a love triangle between the mother, the daughter, and the actor. But a love triangle depends on a character making a choice that forsakes someone else. There is no choice to be made here. Zara doesn’t want her mother to be in a relationship with her boss but Zara isn’t going to lose her family or her employment. There’s no tension to A Family Affair and the characters are consistently selfish and unsympathetic. The movie star is an idiot, the mother lies to her daughter, and Zara is constantly whining. The turns in the drama are predictable; the daughter breaks up the relationship with her temper tantrums and then nudges them back together by parent trapping the couple in a dumb scenario.
Disc extras: Available on Netflix.
Bottom Line: A Family Affair is essentially a Hallmark movie with a more prestigious cast. It may appeal to viewers who watch those cable romances but the actors are wasted in this waft of a story.
Episode: #1007 (August 4, 2024)