Mexico City.- Zara (Joey King) is the assistant of actor Chris Cole (Zac Efron), with whom she has a love-hate relationship. He is a disaster: insecure, disorganized and narcissistic, while she is the one who fixes his life, waiting for a promotion that doesn’t seem to come.
Things get even more complicated when Chris meets Zara’s mom, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a widowed writer with several insecurities of her own, with whom there is an immediate attraction.
A basic rule of any romance is that there is chemistry between the protagonists. Unfortunately, A Family Affair (available on Netflix) never manages to take off because the love affair between Kidman and Efron’s characters is not credible on any level: neither passionate, nor intellectual, nor sentimental.
When they meet, they want to sell us a non-existent sexual magnetism, and when we move on to an intimate dinner, they want to sell us a deep connection rooted in loss that feels very forced.
We just saw a similar romance in the superior The Idea of You, in which a single mother played by Anne Hathaway falls in love with a singer younger than her. Although both are light romantic comedies that end up turning into dramas, that one felt more genuine and down to earth. Here, everything seems to be the product of a script.
More interesting and entertaining is Zara’s odyssey, with Joey King managing to elevate a role that could have been a tantrum, but to which she gives more nuances as she tries to accept this relationship, lives with her grandmother (the great Kathy Bates) and pursues her own dreams. It is a marked contrast to Efron’s rigidity.
The director is Richard LaGravenese, who has a much more prominent career as a screenwriter than behind the camera, and this film will not raise his profile. But if you want to tune out and just spend some time watching attractive actors make things difficult for themselves, there could be worse things.
A FAMILY AFFAIR
Two and a half stars
Directed by: Richard LaGravenese
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Zac Efron and Joey King
Duration: 111 min.
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