‘A Family Affair’ Review: Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron Put on a Nora Ephron Karaoke Act

Nora Ephron’s influence is certainly felt throughout Richard LaGravenese’s new romantic comedy, in everything from the cozy sweaters and the luxuriously lived-in interiors to the cross-cut phone conversations in which our loveably neurotic characters try to figure out this crazy thing called love. And while you’d never mistake it for the real deal—the writing isn’t quite smart enough and it’s visually rizz-less in that typical “made for streaming” way—A Family Affair makes for a pleasant enough addition to the recent rom-com resurgence.

It begins with Chris Cole (Zac Efron), the self-centered star of a Greek mythology-inspired superhero franchise. The movies are crap, and he knows they’re crap, but they make him loads of money and keep him in the spotlight, so he signs on for every sequel that comes his way. However, the script for the latest project looks so bad that even he’s beginning to worry—an anxiety that he takes out almost entirely on his long-suffering assistant, Zara (Joey King).

King gives an endearing performance as the endlessly frazzled but unshakably determined Zara. Whether she’s running around on some obscure errand for Chris or goofing around with her best friend Eugenie (Liza Koshy), she always feels like a real person. By contrast, Efron plays his airheaded douchebag in full self-parody mode—amusingly, yes, but A Family Affair never quite squares that persona with the sweet and thoughtful guy he’s later revealed to be.

It’s Zara’s mother, a celebrated writer named Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman), who draws that nicer side of Chris out. They meet by chance and, after a few hours spent chatting and knocking back tequila shots, end up in bed together. Naturally, Zara walks in on them in flagrante delicto and the rest of LaGravenese’s film, as written by Carrie Solomon, is spent with the three of them trying to navigate this uncomfortable new three-pronged dynamic.

While this all sounds like the springboard for raunchy jokes and age-gap gags, A Family Affair actually has something much gentler in mind. There are no zany sidekick characters, no antic set pieces, and no displays of slapstick aside from one gnarly pratfall that King delivers with aplomb. Instead, the film is mostly a series of heartfelt conversations about each character’s hopes, fears, and insecurities. Some of these are more effective than others. Zara complains about how hard it is to have a famous mother while Brooke talks about how hard it is to have a dead husband. One of these just seems much more like a real problem than the other.

These heart-to-hearts showcase some sweetly sincere performances and contain a few good lines (“No great tryst started with someone being rational,” Leila tells her daughter at one point). Ultimately, though, A Family Affair is a little too packed with soul-searching speeches. We spend less time actually watching Chris and Brooke fall for each other than we do with various people talking about what their relationship might mean. There’s some chemistry between Kidman and Efron, but their characters’ romance is never given enough oxygen to really heat up. It comes to feel like the movie would rather talk about its story than actually tell it.

More fundamentally, the film never really finds a central tension to hold its plot together. We aren’t worried about anyone finding anything out about each other or themselves, as is usually the case in a classically styled rom-com. (Think Billy Crystal’s Harry realizing that he’s in love with Meg Ryan’s Sally in When Harry Met Sally…, or Ryan’s Kathleen figuring out that Tom Hank’s Joe, the guy running the big corporate bookstore in You’ve Got Mail that’s about to put her out of business, is the one who’s been sending her all those lovely emails.) The closest thing to a real conflict is Zara’s objection to Chris and Brooke’s relationship, but there’s only so much drama that can be wrung from “my 25-year-old daughter doesn’t like my boyfriend.”