The fantasy of dating someone famous comes saddled with reality’s baggage. No matter how down-to-earth an actor seems in interviews, or how deeply a musician’s influences speak to you, these always-on jobs demand so much time and emotional energy that there can’t be much left over to bond with a normie. The power dynamics are inherently weird, and performing for a leering celebrity culture has to warp their views of human connection. It’s hard not to become jaded when everyone wants something from you. These impassable roads make up the dramatic infrastructure of the well-worn “famous dates normal” rom-com subgenre, except in the dismal case of A Family Affair.
This Netflix rom-com adds a wrinkle—it follows an age-gap romance between an empty-headed movie star and his assistant’s mom—and, satisfied with its innovation, abandons everything that made the trope worth navigating in the first place. The relationships between alliterative action star Chris Cole (Zac Efron), his harried assistant Zara (Joey King), and her widowed mom Brooke (Nicole Kidman) could, at almost every stage of the film, be completely separated from their professional lives. Brooke sleeps with a younger guy her daughter dislikes; it rarely gets more than skin deep. And, as Efron and Kidman struggle to emote, the feelings their waxen faces fail to convey are anyone’s guess.
Directed by Richard LaGravenese, every moment in A Family Affair sits there as lifelessly as Gerard Butler’s character in LaGravenese’s most successful movie, P.S. I Love You. And that’s not just the fault of the expressionless romantic leads, regrettably cast opposite each other in a way that makes the whole film feel like Joey King’s vacation to the uncanny valley.
Like P.S. I Love You, this romance and its goofy contrivances (courtesy of first-time feature writer Carrie Solomon) paint in broad punchlines and sloppy sentiment. The genre’s familiar stock characters make appearances—two obnoxious comic relief friends and one emotional support grandma (Kathy Bates, returning for another serving of nothing after playing a mom in P.S.)—as the movie pads out its predictable beats for an excruciating hour-forty-five.
Zara’s job is thankless. Being an assistant sucks, and being Chris’ assistant really sucks. He’s an immature diva, hopped up on workout supplements and superhero movie success. Fed up being his gofer after being promised the fast-track to producer, she quits. Chris’ first night without his assistant, during which he stares at the ceiling in bed, is accompanied by the Lauv song “fuck, i’m lonely,” which offers this emotional insight during its chorus: “Fuck, I’m lonely, I’m lonely, I’m lonely.”
Now that that’s been cleared up, nobody’s confused when Chris walks into Zara’s home unannounced, and runs into Brooke. A stiff flirtation and some improbable mid-morning shots of tequila later (as well as the most absurd use of Greek literature in an age-gap romance since The Boy Next Door’s “first edition of the Iliad”), and they’re in bed together. After Zara inevitably walks in on them, the relationship continues following the playbook: They promise each other it’s just sex, then catch feelings; they run around behind Zara’s back, then get caught.
Struggling to hold those moments together is thematic mortar from other kinds of movies. Zara feels aimless around her career and neglects her friends, blockbusters get lightly mocked during sequences on the green-screen set of Chris’ movie, there’s some confusing lip service paid to feminism—it even screeches to a halt for a little Christmas gathering.
While A Family Affair is coming out in the middle of the summer, it was initially supposed to hit Netflix at the end of last November before it got shelved. Now this seasonal incongruity feels shoehorned in, an extra carousel slot (“Holiday Romances We Think You’ll Like”) made available to please Netflix’s algorithm. That particular detail might have a good explanation, but the possibility haunts many of the film’s oddest choices. Why does the film sometimes seem to cut in the middle of a joke? Were scenes given a mandated length? Why is a ground-level extreme close-up of some happy dogs being walked one of the only times cinematographer Don Burgess deviates from his too-slick Hallmark frames? Did a data analyst note that a screen mostly filled with dog faces was likely to keep viewers from backing out of the movie and turning on Love Is Blind?
But even a spreadsheet couldn’t wring value from most of A Family Affair’s flaws. While its lovestruck leads struggle to make heartbreak look different than drunken sexual passion, the connection between their characters could at least feel like it made logical sense. But the script never connects Chris’ starting point as a complete dick and his immediate face turn to hunky angel. It also never bothers to give Brooke—who is apparently a ridiculously famous and successful author, though we have to take the movie’s word on that—any development beyond a tragic backstory. Their relationship is one of those that happens only because it is the premise of the movie. It is built of backlit makeouts and vacation commercial montages, of images not emotions.
Not to unfairly compare A Family Affair to The Idea Of You, the rom-com from earlier this year that executes an extremely similar idea competently, but that movie at least has a passing interest in the specifics of its premise. When its older woman dates its famous younger man, it’s a tabloid sensation—a huge pain in the ass. Watching its lovers from different worlds (and with different levels of life experience) overcome those obstacles lends the movie much of its charm and makes the relationship they fight for seem worth something to the characters. Chris’ fame only ever seems to come up when it can save the production a couple bucks on extras: He and Brooke have dinner in an empty restaurant, sneak around abandoned film sets, arrive early to canoodle in a deserted banquet hall before a gala. Without a curiosity for where those sexy-yet-lonesome moments lead, or why they have to be that way, A Family Affair can’t even pass muster as generic.