To confirm what I wrote in the Trigger Warning reviewis always the cast to make it shoot up to the top of the rankings Netflix a new film from the day it comes out.
A Family Affairthe romantic comedy with Nicole Kidman e Zac Efronit came out June 28 and is still firmly in command of the most viewed films in Italy.
And no, its entertainment level is nothing like the Jessica Alba action movie: A Family Affair is fun. Maybe predictable, but never boring.
The plot of A Family Affair
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Zara Ford (Joey King, Fargo, Bullet Train) is the personal assistant of the Hollywood super star Chris Cole (Zac Efron, The Greatest Showman, Ted Bundy), the protagonist of an action saga that has made him universally known. Capricious, inconsistent and spoiled, Chris is on the verge of pathological behavior and Zara soon reaches the limit, resigning after the umpteenth offense suffered by her boss.
Chris, despite being a superstar, is a very lonely person: he fears that anyone will approach him and do so precisely because of his fame and wealth. When he realizes how patient Zara has been with him, he goes to her house to beg her to get back to work. But Zara isn’t there. Zara’s mother welcomes Chris, Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman, Oscar winner for The Hours), a widowed writer, intelligent and charming. Between Chris and Brooke the attraction is immediate, but Zara gets in the way. With the complicity of the paternal grandmother Leila Ford (Kathy Bates, Oscar for Misery must not die but would have deserved 10 more), Zara will finally understand something about herself and her family.
A classic romantic comedy, without surprises but also without pretensions
A Family Affair is a film from canonical structure: first, second and third acts strictly respect the Hollywood paradigm by Syd Field. There is nothing in the narrative structure that is not predictableor that it doesn’t arrive exactly in the moment where we expect it. However, the light atmosphere and the many scenes funny (first of all the one where Zara discovers Chris and Brooke together for the first time) make it a film of easy use.
Characters, narrative turns, funny gags and romantic atmospheres flow smoothly. But also without pretensions.
We are faced with a love story involving an actor, or rather a movie megastar, and a woman much older than him, but we are far away both from the themes and the psychological insights present, for example, in the Prime Video film The Idea of You with Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine, which has a very, very similar plot.
Netflix has chosen to answer to the story of a music star who falls in love with an ordinary woman, a simple stranger much older than him, carefully avoiding putting her life at risk delicate topics treated by The Idea of You, which is clearly superior to them. Nevertheless, we are faced with two vere movie star (and also music star, in Efron’s case) who they make fun of clichés on celebrity, on the desire for privacy and on the impossibility of making very simple common gestures, permitted to everyone but not to those who are immediately recognized as soon as they put their nose out of the house.
The reflection on famehowever, here it is played deliberately superficial and no, he never even thought of pushing us to feel a minimum of compassion for very rich, very beautiful, very famous people and with the world at his feet. This is already honestas an intent.
Everything else is based on some effective jokes, some really funny physical gags and a story that continues exactly as we would expect but which, in this specific case, rather than being annoyingly predictable, has something reassuring.
A Family Affair is one of those films that imitates polite comedies of the pastadding today’s technology and a cast that enjoys poking fun at itself, and it shows.
A perfect film for a quiet evening with the family, when you’re too tired for even the slightest bit of complex plots or when you just don’t feel like watching people kill each other.
The explanation Brooke offers Chris about the myth of Icaruswhich the actor had no idea about, is a satire of the average ignorance of that Hollywood that focuses on muscle and not on brains. It’s more than Die Hard + Miracle on 34th Street, though. Let’s be clear: John McClane (the policeman in the saga played by Bruce Willis) was light years ahead of Icarus Rush, Cole’s character. But infinitely further.
To close, not that I need to underline it because it shows, but in any case the age difference between Nicole Kidman and Zac Efron is not 16 as their characters tell us. There are 23. Take yourself well from her and badly from him.
 Response to Prime’s Anne Hathaway Movie: A Family Affair Review){kind=link}