A Family Affair (2024)

Netflix has delivered another entry in the age-gap romantic comedy register, this one pairing Nicole Kidman with Zac Efron and asking us to believe that a self-absorbed movie star would fall for his assistant's mother. The premise is sturdy enough. The execution, according to the critical consensus, is a squabble of tones. Richard LaGravenese directs with a rigid politeness, and the result plays like a well-tailored garment purchased from a rack of identical garments. The gate code changes, the assistant quits, the mother wanders into the frame, and the machinery grinds forward on schedule. It is pleasant. It is forgettable. It is, by the standards of our current cultural accounting, remarkably quiet.

For those of us who tabulate these things, the ledger is nearly blank. The film features Liza Koshy in a supporting role, and her presence is neither explained nor interrogated, which is to say the casting is incidental. Race is not a subject here. Neither is climate, nor class, nor the body, nor the mind's varied wiring. There are no queer characters, no systemic grievances, no historical corrections. The film is a romance about a woman and a younger man, and it declines to make an argument about either of them.

The feminist content is present but passive. We get a mother and daughter negotiating honesty and a widow rediscovering pleasure, which is a modest and legitimate subject. A thesis is absent. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody indicts the industry or the patriarchy. Kathy Bates arrives as the wise grandmother-in-law and dispenses warmth instead of ideology. The film wants only to be a rom-com, and it succeeds at wanting.