What would you do if your mother had an affair with your boss? This hypothetical question may be the worst nightmare for many people, but in reality, A family affair It is also the situation that Zara has to face (Joey King) when her boss, Chris Cole (Zac Efron), falls in love with her mother Brooke (Nicole Kidman). As if that weren’t enough, Chris is a Hollywood superstar.
With these narrative threads, the Netflix romantic comedy is presented that has reunited Efron and Kidman after they both hit it off and demonstrated their good chemistry in The newspaper boy (2012), from Lee DanielsBehind the camera, the screenwriter and director Richard LaGravenese (Paris, je t’aime; Postcript I love you), orchestrating a story of Carrie Solomon (Ocean’s).
‘A Family Affair’ movie review
At this point in the movie, saying that a film with Nicole Kidman will fix any script mess is almost a cliché, but it is true that there is currently no actress with such photogenicity and such magic in the glittering sky of Hollywood.
Is not that A family affair , Richard LaGravenese’s Netflix movie, is a disaster. In fact, it is a rather standard romantic comedy, with dreamy moments, some comical and others too functional and that could even be eliminated. In all of them where Kidman appears, however, she looks like we haven’t seen her in a long time.
Kidman’s naturalness when playing Brooke Hardwood, a writer who has been widowed for years, mother of a young woman who works as an assistant to a Hollywood star, links that role with that of the charming Julia Roberts in Notting Hill (Roger Michell, 1999), but in reverse, since here she would play the role that Hugh Grant once played.
The reference is not trivial, because much of Michell’s film is in this one from Netflix, although instead of the bohemian and chic London that captivated an entire generation of film buffs, we find ourselves in a Beverly Hills that is perhaps too routine and flat to serve as the setting for a romantic comedy, with its streets full of SUVs and its bland ‘coffee to go’. Equally ordinary is, by the way, LaGravenese’s visual planning, which invites us to think about everything we have lost in these 25 years that go from one film to the other.
The surprise in A Family Affair is Zac Efron, who plays the superstar Chris Cole, one of those idols who is as egocentric as he is fragile, whose vulnerability is revealed when he meets Brooke. It is clear that the actor from High School Musical either Ricky Stanicky takes the best jokes and fits with aplomb all the criticism about the narcissism of the actors that Solomon’s script displays.
Hopefully, in this sense, Solomon’s stories find more space, because despite the narrative and visual clichés, tolls that a generalist rom-com must go through, A Family Affair has a few especially fresh jokes and comic scenes. Like the moment when our young protagonist literally bumps into her mother and boss in bed. If you don’t laugh at that, go get yourself checked out.
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