A Family Affair: When Age-Gap Romance Goes Wrong

Nicole Kidman’s latest romcom, A Family Affair, had all the makings of a great film. A celebrated writer, a shallow movie star, and a kooky assistant - what could go wrong? Unfortunately, the film’s promising start quickly turns into a cliched mess, leaving viewers wondering what could have been.

The age-gap romance that didn’t quite work out

The film reunites Kidman with Zac Efron, who starred together in The Paperboy in 2013. Efron plays Chris Cole, a vain and shallow young movie star in LA, who mistreats his assistant Zara, played by Joey King. Zara has to cater to Chris’s every whim, including organizing the purchase of special “breakup” diamond earrings that Chris always gives to the women he’s about to dump.

Then Chris meets Zara’s incredibly hot widowed mother Brooke Harwood (Kidman), a celebrated writer whose early inspiration is Joan Didion. Brooke’s sensitivity unlocks Chris’s hidden niceness and vulnerability, and they have rock ’n’ roll age-gap sex to the horror and disgust of Zara, who still has to pick up Chris’s dry cleaning.

The initial setup is great, with an Ephronesque excitable phone conversation montage that’s tolerable, but the cliched breakup and makeup plot transition clanks. When Chris has to magically stop being a hilarious airhead and start being Mr. Perfect, things become pretty insufferable.

A thoughtful gift that falls flat

There’s an extraordinary moment when Chris gives Brooke her Christmas present: a weirdly cheap-looking book with gold-embossed lettering called The Brooke Harwood Anthology: “It’s got all your essays from the New Yorker and Vogue and all your stories in one place! You like it?” - “I love it!” Didion would have told him to stick his homemade book where there is an absence of sunshine.

A Family Affair is a missed opportunity, a film that had the potential to be a great romcom but ended up being a solemn and cliched mess.

The romcom that didn’t quite live up to expectations