True to its banal title, ‘A Family Affair’ artfully features easily disposable characters whose color-by-numbers personalities and motivations randomly shift in order to suit the storyline. As with last month’s streaming romance, ‘The Idea of You,’ this film has a beautiful middle aged woman falling for a younger male super performer, with all the stampede of entertainment that comes with it.
In ‘Paperboy’, Kidman’s character is an award-winning author Brooke Harwood, and Efron is a superhero franchise actor Chris Cole, whose daughter Zara (Joey King) is a movie star, who becomes Brooke’s daughter and spends time working as a personal assistant to Chris. This means picking up the dry-cleaning, fetching the groceries or even presenting the diamond-studded earrings to girls as a present before he breaks up with them. Although Zara realizes how self-centered and useless Chris is, she decides to stick with him, anticipating the moment when he comes through for her.
Zara had made a home with Brooke who has been a widow for eleven years. They are very fond of each other, and both are close to Leila (Kathy Bates), Brooke’s kind and affectionate mother in law and Zara’s grandmother.
It’s amazing how much timing matters in life. Zara decides to quit her job, just as Chris is preparing to shoot another sequel in his popular “Icarus” series. Chris goes to Zara’s house to convince her to return. He is able to hook up with Brooke and as they are about to make love, Zara walks in. To make matters worse, what is intended to be a brilliant scene of Zara’s violent retching comes off completely garbled. It does not.
Anguished as she is, however, she eventually consents to return to work for Chris in the hope of receiving the title of ‘associate producer’ on his new film and consideration for never seeing her mother again. He finds it convenient to keep the former promise and ignores the later promise which leads to numerous troubles and clashing as expected.
There are no snowballing events but there are sharp moments when screenwriter Carrie Solomon gets a kick out of the movie industrial complex. The montage showing thoughts on the main character Chris’ rise to fame includes features such as magazine cover photos (GQ, Vanity Fair) speculating about his girlfriend, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and even an appearance in Hot Ones show. In an extraordinary case of life reflecting art, real-life actor Zac Efron’s dramatic and extreme dieting to look bulked up for the movie “The Iron Claw” influenced a scene of Chris in an ice bath.
Other than usually irritated, Zara now seems on a first-name basis with all the paparazzi dangling outside his gate. One of the latest Icarus franchise films which has been described more as Die Hard meets Miracle on 34th Street with some bits of Speed has a female French director that does not talk in English. It is quite ridiculous that in a PG-13 setting one illegal scene has to be re-shot just because there is supposed to be a gun, and a gun cannot be in the trailer.
Zara arrives at the restaurant late for the meeting with Chris due to traffic. According to Chris, the delay gave him too much time to prepare what he wanted to say. A big pink robot statue standing in Chris’s house is exactly the kind of fashionable enemy that a young newly rich man would love to collect as a trophy.
Nonetheless, the concept of a show business pretty able who is more sad than spoiled is passe, and here this film really had to update this stereotype. Chris, established as conceited and dim-witted, is, however, expected to pen a couple of book covers together with an award-winning author who has many books published somewhere, and committed to have her explain why the character for which he is famous bears the name of said Greek myth about a boy who flew too close to the sun, promising them after the deed only for the knockers to turn into a faithful love.
Their relationship does not have even the slightest chance of reaching the low threshold of being a pretty-people-smooching and romance-centric flick. Zara’s best friends played by Liza Koshy and Sherry Cola are more entertaining than King who tries her level best to exude anxiety as well as horror. The last part is quite poor with an unwarranted complication, a concern that came in too late plus an awkward attempt at evoking a cozy, white Christmas feel that makes one think of Hallmark Channel. The nadir includes an incredible confession argument that seems to have been intended to strengthen the Brooke/Chris connection as if anyone had any connection to it in the first place and, in any case, looks like the kind of random intrusive alteration that Zara and her screen writer friend would have cut.
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