A Family Affair movie review & film summary (2024)
Zara still lives with Brooke, a widow for 11 years. They are both very close to Leila (Kathy Bates), Brooke’s warm-hearted and supportive mother-in-law and Zara’s grandmother.
Zara finally gets fed up and quits her job, just as Chris is about to start filming another sequel in his popular “Icarus” series. Chris goes to the house to persuade Zara to come back. He meets Brooke, and soon, they are literally ripping each other’s clothes off, just in time for Zara to come home and discover them in flagrante delicto. This leads to what is supposed to be an amusing scene of Zara retching. It is not.
Horrified as Zara is, she agrees to return to work for Chris in exchange for an associate producer credit on his new movie and a promise that he will never see her mother again. He keeps the first promise but not the second, leading to the expected complications and confrontations.
There are no surprises here, but there are a few sharp observations and bright moments when screenwriter Carrie Soloman has some fun with the movie industry setting. The opening montage that establishes Chris as a huge star hits all the right notes, from the magazine covers (GQ, Vanity Fair) to the speculation about his dating life to a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and his appearance on “Hot Ones.” In a case of art imitating life, a scene of Chris taking an ice bath was inspired by real-life Zac Efron's bulking-up regimen for "The Iron Claw."
Zara is on a first-name basis with the paparazzi who swarm outside his gate. The latest “Icarus” franchise film, repeatedly described as “’Die Hard’ meets ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ with a little bit of ‘Speed,’” is directed by a French woman who does not speak English, and Chris has to re-shoot a scene because they can’t have a gun in the trailer for a PG-13. When Zara gets stuck in traffic and is late getting to the restaurant where Chris plans to break up with his girlfriend, he complains that the wait meant he had to think of too many things to say. The big pink robot statue in Chris’s home is precisely the overpriced junk a young guy who is suddenly rich would think was cool.
