A FAMILY AFFAIR, REVIEW: NICOLE KIDMAN ENTERS ROMCOM PURGATORY WITH STILTED SEX SCENES AND BAD JOKES
Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman previously tangled in the 2012 psychological thriller The Paperboy. They now meet again in the tissue-thin A Family Affair—a film that ticks off an entire bingo card of misfires by being a comedy deficient in laughs, a romance without chemistry and a Hollywood satire with all the bite of a stuffed hedgehog.
Efron plays a muscle-bound movie star, while Kidman is the widowed author with whom he embarks on a turbulent and ill-advised romance that feels significantly too steamy for Netflix’s 12 rating. It’s a real step down for these former A-listers, whose recent projects have failed to connect to varying degrees and who find themselves at a point in their careers where the purgatory of a streaming romcom doesn’t seem as hellish as might once have been the case.
They aren’t the only ones who have fallen down the rungs. Director Richard LaGravenese wrote the screenplay for Terry Gilliam’s bizarre Arthurian comedy The Fisher King and Jonathan Demme’s adaption of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Alas, he takes a nose-dive with this dire tilt at lust-fuelled farce which introduces Joey King as Zara, hustling Gen Z daughter of Kidman’s high-brow novelist, Brooke Harwood.
Joey dreams of becoming a Hollywood producer, an aspiration that has led her to the door of Chris Cole (Efron), a matinee idol trapped in a Marvel-style franchise that pays for his lavish lifestyle but leaves him creatively unfilled.
Cole and Harwood become lovers after the actor sacks Joey – his long-suffering PA – and then turns up at her mother’s house trying to hire his assistant back (Kathy Bates bumbles about in the background as Brooke’s hippyish boomer mother). Joey is furious that her boss and her mother are together - though not so angry that she doesn’t see the fling as an opportunity to further her ambitions to become a producer.
Efron’s signature is a lunkish charm, which is fine when he’s playing a conventional romantic lead. Here, his energy is entirely at odds with a script that presents Cole as a bullying and narcissistic man-baby. The film expects us to cheer for Chris even as we watch him treat Joey horribly—calling her in the middle of the night to run errands and then firing her over the intercom when she arrives late to a meeting.
Such strops are apparently intended to humanise Cole. They instead make him look like a grinning sociopath—a smarmy, toxic gaslighter whom Efron confuses for a misunderstood Prince Charming.
His unsettling performance is matched by the strained and unnerving Kidman, who once again comes off as an alien trying to impersonate a human being. During the several stilted love scenes you half expect her jaw to detach from her palate so that she can swallow Efron whole and slip into a contented doze.
Kidman is no stranger to ominous bedroom romps. She perfected the art of the terrifying snog opposite then-husband Tom Cruise in the Stanley Kubrick psychodrama Eyes Wide Shut. The difference is that Kubrick played up the strange vibes on purpose, whereas, in this case, the weirdness between Kidman and Efron is an unhappy accident. The result is the same, however, and though A Family Affair shoots for laughs, it ends up in an uncanny valley of spooky sex and dead-on-arrival jokes.
12 cert, 113 min. On Netflix from June 28
2024-06-27T15:20:41Z dg43tfdfdgfd