“It’s all been done.”
The genius of that song by The Barenaked Ladies, is that they used a formulaic pop song to express the theme.
There are few entertainment genres that this applies to more than romantic comedies.
Boy meets girl (or some other combination thereof); they fall in love; something disrupts their bliss; they try to move on, but realize they can’t live without each other; happy ending.
Most of the time they are trite and barely watchable, but every now and again with the right combination of good writing, good directing, good acting and a more or less novel premise, they can be quite entertaining.
Such is the case with the new Netfilx offering A Family Affair.
This 2024 film, starring Nicole Kidman and Zack Efron has been described as “a parody of Hollywood excess and narcissism.”
Chris Cole (played by Efron) is a Hollywood star who is so big and self-involved, he can barely function in normal society. His selfish ineptitude drives his indispensable and harried assistant Zara (Joey King) to walk out on him.
Realizing he cannot function without her, particularly because the newest installment in his blockbuster “Icarus Rush” franchise (Diehard meets Miracle on 34th Street meets Speed, as he describes it) is a shambles.
Cole tries to seek Zara out at home, where he meets her mom Brooke (Kidman), a widowed, notable author (boy meets girl) who is considerably older (the novel premise given the trope is usually older man-impossibly younger woman).
It is here, that director Richard LaGravenese and writer Carrie Solomon weave the ‘it’s all be done’ theme expertly into the movie.
As they get to know each other over a bottle of exceptionally good tequila, the narcissistic Cole is stunned Brooke has never seen the Icarus Rush movies.
“Does your character’s wings melt flying too close to the sun,” Brooke asks slightly drunkenly.
The clueless Cole, unfamiliar with the Icarus myth on which his character is based, is once again taken aback.
“No, but they do get burned flying too close to an underground nuclear fusion plant,” he responds. “That’s crazy, how did you know that?”
Brooke introduces him to Greek mythology and, of course, they end up in bed where Zara catches them and the plot proceeds predictably.
Despite the formulaic approach — or perhaps because of it as it is a parody as well as a rom com — it is a funny movie, At times laugh-out-loud funny as it rises above the genre with clever writing, tight directing and great performances by Kidman, Efron and King, as well as, Kathy Bates, who plays the grandmother.
