A decade ago, Joey King survived a terrorist invasion of The People’s House in Roland Emmerich’s spirited “White House Down,” and now in Netflix’s rom com “A Family Affair,” she survives something even more arduous – being the personal assistant to a vapid Hollywood star! Yikes! She is Zara, 24 years old and dreaming of becoming a player in Hollywood yet left to run errands for movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron) instead. As “A Family Affair” opens, she is rushing to an L.A. restaurant to help him let his latest love down easy. In another movie, this might foreshadow a romance blossoming between assistant and boss. King, though, is but 24, and Efron 36, and as it turns out, director Richard LaGravanese and writer Carrie Solomon have a different age-inappropriate romance in mind. That’s between Efron and Nicole Kidman, age 57, playing Zara’s mom Brooke, a writer struggling to put pen to page, or finger to laptop, after the death of her husband only to be enlisted by Chris for crucial rewrites to help save his latest blockbuster.
With plenty of La La Land inside jokes and big, bright, airy set design, the whole thing plays like a Nancy Meyers joint, and at least for the first half, “A Family Affair” lives up to that frothy kind of promise. It gets its narrative ducks in a row with some panache, and the ever-clever Efron is giving a very good performance here, self-absorbed and vacuous without becoming too unlikable, truly managing to evince a sheltered celebrity who has inadvertently surrendered any understanding of the real world and reality. As “A Family Affair” moves into its second half, however, and the Chris and Brooke romance assumes center stage, the movie disintegrates. It’s not that they are impossible to believe together but that their romance is etched too much in glossy montage and, worse, Efron recalibrates his performance to make their relationship believable. It’s not that he becomes a new man in her presence, it’s that Chris feels too much like he’s someone else entirely as Efron diffuses all sense of pre-established vacuousness. What’s worse, Brooke’s script rewrite subplot weirdly seems to be forgotten, either victim of “A Family Affair’s” own rewrite or its editing. This means that rather than trying to make her way in Hollywood, Zara becomes more about trying to break her mom and her boss up, and “A Family Affair” turns into a rom com about manufacturing conflict as opposed to living it.
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