Nicole Kidman deserves more than this insipid Netflix romcom

A Family Affair, Netflix
★★½

It’s almost impossible not to draw comparisons between A Family Affair and the recent Anne Hathaway romcom The Idea of You. Both feature a creative woman with a successful career who is wooed by a much younger man. In both instances, he is a huge star (a musician in the Hathaway film, an actor here). Both women have a daughter who has concerns, both legitimate and selfish, about her mother’s new love match.

In A Family Affair, it’s Nicole Kidman as the older woman and Zac Efron as the younger man. Kidman’s Brooke Harwood is a writer – a Pulitzer Prize winner, no less, which perhaps explains how she can afford to live in a massive house overlooking the beach rather than a tiny one-bedroom walk-up in a crack-infested suburb of LA.

Efron’s Chris Cole is the star of an increasingly mindless action-movie franchise and he’s about to start work on a woefully scripted sequel when they meet. Brooke’s daughter Zara (Joey King) is his long-suffering assistant and she has seen all his moves, which gives her good reason to want to tell her mother to get the hell out while she still can.

For the first half of the movie, which is directed by Richard LaGravenese (who wrote the Steven Soderbergh biopic of Liberace, Behind the Candelabra), there’s fun enough to be had from Zara’s struggle to break free of the tyrannical grip of her self-obsessed, narcissistic and apparently brainless boss.

There’s also good value later in the depiction of Zara as a lousy friend, so focused on the injustices and insults of her situation that she fails to register the fact her best friend’s relationship is falling apart before her eyes. And as for acknowledging that her mother might have an identity and desires beyond, well, being a mother, let’s just say Zara registers a zero.

But A Family Affair falls down in the romcom stakes. It’s easy enough to buy the idea that Kidman and Efron’s characters might be attracted to each other despite the ostensible 16-year age gap (in reality, it’s 20 years), but the dynamic between them is more slapstick than sexy. And while The Idea of You tempers its generic box-ticking with some genuine concern for the difficulties a famous and a non-famous person might face in trying to have a romance in the full glare of the paparazzi, this film barely flirts with the idea before rendering it as a minor problem to be swept away by the magical powers of a budding young producer. Ah, the magic of the movies.

In the end, A Family Affair plays like nothing so much as a better-produced and (mostly) better-acted version of the sort of romcom the streaming production line has been pumping out in recent years. Cue the sunsets, beaches, candle-lit dinners and endless costume changes. It’s generic, predictable, mildly enjoyable and instantly forgettable.