Fun, Flawed Entertainment Captures What It Means To Be A Netflix Movie

Summary

• A Family Affair balances comedy and drama, excelling in its casting and humor, but lacking chemistry between romantic leads.
• The film explores the value of seeing others beyond their roles and personal growth, while highlighting Netflix’s limitations in visual storytelling.
• A Family Affair‘s success and shortcomings hint at the changing landscape of Netflix movies, emphasizing the importance of engaging visuals.

Watching A Family Affair really got me thinking about what it means to be a Netflix movie. The streaming giant has released many daring projects, including some of my favorite films of the past few years, but those don’t end up defining the brand. They ask for all of our attention, and even benefit from the close rewatches that streaming makes easy. A Netflix movie, as it’s culturally understood, is much less demanding. It accepts, or perhaps embraces, that the audience’s eyes won’t always be on the screen.

As a critic, watching whatever I’m assigned with undivided attention is my job, and movies of this type don’t always survive that level of stress test. But we should still expect them to – accepting that not all entertainment wants to be art doesn’t mean anything gets a pass for shoddiness. This brings me to A Family Affair, which you could just listen to without ever feeling lost. Under the weight of watchful eyes, it creaks and groans. But it doesn’t collapse. It stays light and fun, whether experienced actively or passively.

A Family Affair Works Best When Going For Laughs

And when Zac Efron and Joey King share the screen

That’s largely because, at least in my experience, it gets the comedy part of its premise right. Zara (Joey King) works for movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron) as his personal assistant, an infamously challenging job in the ego-driven Hollywood ecosystem. She’s an aspiring producer and took the role on the promise of industry training, but after two years, she’s still mostly running his errands, managing his breakups, and dealing with his petty tantrums. When the film begins, she’s near her breaking point.

King and Efron are the best pairing in A Family Affair. They give their characters a personal connection bubbling beneath their turbulent professional relationship that makes them feel like siblings (except with Zara playing the elder sister to her infantilized-by-fame boss), which turns their arguing into bickering. The script is clearly invested in sending up this kind of Hollywood personality, and Efron is locked in, selling every joke at his own character’s expense.

Meanwhile, Zara’s mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), is at a turning point of her own. An accomplished author, she’s starting to try and write personally again, with the once-overwhelming death of Zara’s father now years behind them. Leila (Kathy Bates), her editor and also her mother-in-law, is encouraging Brooke to start dating again, too. Kidman and Bates, next in line for best duo, get most of those expository scenes required to keep the passive viewers engaged, but they breeze along on the strength of their star power.

It’s not exactly a great sign when a rom-com’s romantic leads are at best its #3 actor pairing, but it speaks to a stark divide in what A Family Affair does and doesn’t do well.

These storylines collide when Chris meets Brooke by chance, having come looking for Zara when she wasn’t home. They realize how little they know about each other and get to talking, discover they have more to talk about than they expected, and one thing leads to another. This is, naturally, a hell Zara could not have imagined for herself. The three actors intermingle to form A Family Affair‘s rom-com energy, with Kidman a grounded presence swept up in romance, King leaning into comedic exaggeration, and Efron bouncing between the two poles.

It’s not exactly a great sign when a rom-com’s romantic leads are at best its #3 actor pairing, but it speaks to a stark divide in what A Family Affair does and doesn’t do well. Their first scene (which is also the one most played for laughs) is by far their best, but as much as we understand why their characters are drawn to one another, Kidman and Efron lack that critical spark that keeps us invested in the push-and-pull of their relationship.

It could be a chemistry issue, but it could also be script, since the movie leaning into drama in its second half nearly sinks the whole thing.

A Family Affair Suffers From A Common Netflix Movie Problem

Even if it ultimately still holds itself together

Its strengths, however, kept it afloat for me. The benefit of this three-headed structure is that when I wasn’t so invested in Chris and Brooke, I still cared about how their fling would affect their relationships with Zara. And, as the title suggests, the film is smart enough not to suddenly ignore those character dynamics when the new couple emerges. If A Family Affair has a larger point, it’s about the value of seeing others beyond the roles they occupy in your life, and of letting yourself be more than the roles you play, even if willingly.

What it means to be a Netflix movie is likely changing. The streamer hired a new head of their film division this year, and with him, the era of industry-beating volume and sometimes exorbitant budgets is reportedly coming to an end.

So, while it has its weak spots, A Family Affair holds together well enough to entertain. In doing so, however, it also suffers from the hamstringing of visual storytelling that comes with this kind of Netflix movie. Much like in the classic approach to TV, the camera exists to see, not to speak. There can be additive visual moments (such as a good sight gag involving an absurdly heavy door), but if you’re trying to keep an inattentive audience engaged, the movie can’t hinge on something you have to watch to catch.

This is, undoubtedly, limiting. It can also sometimes translate into a sort of bland aesthetic, as if attention to the image beyond its most basic function no longer has value. It got me thinking about how Nancy Meyers almost made a Netflix movie, and how this film seems to try and mine the same vein as her work, but without her knack for opulent design. Its absence is notable, for this active viewer at least.

Netflix reportedly moved on from Meyers’ star-studded Paris Paramount in 2023 for budget reasons, and the project was unable to find new studio backing in time to film with its planned cast.

What it means to be a Netflix movie is likely changing. The streamer hired a new head of their film division this year, and with him, the era of industry-beating volume and sometimes exorbitant budgets is reportedly coming to an end. But the emphasis on passive viewing won’t be going away anytime soon. So, I hope executives learn from what works about A Family Affair, and realize that even if the visual language of filmmaking must be secondary, the image must still be cared for.

A Family Affair is available to stream on Netflix Friday, June 28. The film is 111 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for sexual content, partial nudity and some strong language.