A family affair (A Family AffairUnited States/2024). Direction: Richard LaGravenese. Cast: Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron, Joey King, Liza Koshy and Kathy Bates. Screenplay: Carrie Solomon. Photography: Don Burgess. Editing: Melissa Bretherton. Music: Siddhartha Khosla. Duration: 111 minutes. Available on Netflix from Friday, June 28.
A few days ago, for academic reasons, I saw again A Decade Under the Influencea 2003 documentary in which Richard LaGravenese interviewed (and vindicated) key artists of the American film revolution of the 1970s such as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Sydney Pollack, Paul Mazursky, Roger Corman, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Milos Forman, Dennis Hopper, Paul Schrader and Peter Bogdanovich, among several others.
Two decades after that film essay (10 years after his last feature film as a director), LaGravenese returns with an absolutely minor film (innocuous with the most benevolent look possible), calculated and conceived with pure formula, in which everyone (including him, of course) seems to work according to rules, on autopilot, with that professionalism that allows them to collect what we intuit will have been generous checks (it’s a linguistic game because they must receive transfers) without the slightest guilt. In other words, we are not faced with any nonsense and one can even accept that it is a passing proposal of less than two hours included in the monthly subscription that is paid to Netflix, but the contrasts between everything that those great masters of the 70s said in A decade under the influence regarding audacity, provocation or creative freedom and mediocrity of A family affair makes you want to cry.
Zara Ford (Joey King, the best of the cast along with grandmother Kathy Bates here) is a twenty-something who works in Los Angeles as a 24/7 assistant to Chris Cole (a lackluster Zac Efron), an actor specializing in action films who accumulates all the commonplaces of an egocentric and insufferable Hollywood star. Zara, who can’t get her boss to keep her promise to promote her to associate producer, still lives with her mother Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a famous novelist who has been widowed too young.
One day, after Zara and Chris fight and she leaves him, he gets off his pedestal and leaves his mansion to ring the doorbell of his former employee to ask her to come back. The one who opens the door is, of course, Brooke and soon (with some entanglements and guilt, of course) they begin what an old chronicler would define as a “torrid romance.”
The age difference between the two (in real life, Kidman, 57, is a little more than two decades older than Efron, 36) is one of the “audacity” (yes, in quotation marks) of the film and the other would be (yes, potentially) the fact that the daughter discovers that her mother is sleeping with her boss.
Beyond the fact that newcomer Carrie Solomon’s script doesn’t have a lick of wit and LaGravenese’s staging doesn’t have much grace, sparkle or charm, the worst thing is that the chemistry between Efron and Kidman (who had already worked together in 2013 at the top The Paperboy) is minimal (not to say zero), and that is serious, I would say unforgivable, because a film of these characteristics must rest above all on the magnetism of its leading figures. If the central couple does not dazzle, there is nothing that shines and the result is, then, a decidedly bland and inconsequential film.
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