THE FAMILY FANG
Starz
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten, Shockya
Grade: B
Director: Jason Bateman
Written by: David Lindsay-Abaire based on Kevin Wilson novel of the same name
Cast: Jason Bateman, Nicole Kidman, Christopher Walken, Maryann Plunkett
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 4/7/16
Opens: April 29, 2016 in NY. May 6, 2016 wider.
How many of us would like to have parents like those who produced Anne Fang (Nicole Kidman) and her brother Baxter Fang (Jason Bateman)? The parents, Caleb Fang (Christopher Walken) and his wife Camille (Maryann Plunkett) are performance artists who regularly state that the purpose of art is to shake up the audience, not to soothe them. In one example, Caleb drops a drinking glass on the floor. “That’s art.” When he picks up the glass, “That’s life.” Obviously, art is more impressive than life.
Yet some people might think these are monstrous parents, but maybe the youngsters who are brought up by “performance” artists are not destroyed by them, despite Caleb’s statement’s that “parents mess up their kids. That’s what they do.”
In fact the most dramatic performance that the kids and their parents conducts occurs near the beginning of the story when brother and sister are young. They drive to a bank, Caleb in the uniform of a security guard. Right after their arrival young Baxter (Jack McCarthy), who is about six years old, shows the teller (Allison Jean Whtie) a handwritten note, “Don’t be stupid. Give me the lollipop.” When she does, he pulls a gun, demands all the lollipops, fires a blank, and is wrestled to the floor by his dad, the experience shaking up all customers, especially when Camille, playing a bystander, who oozes fake blood. Yet David Lindsay-Abaire who scripted the film based on Kevin Wilson’s novel “The Family Fang,” may believe that these parents have damaged their children.
Maybe not, if you consider that the youngsters absorbed their parents’ creativity, with Anne’s becoming a successful actress and Baxter at work on his third novel.
Actor-director Jason Bateman, using several flashbacks, shows old movies demonstrating the parental performances, while a comic incident reveals Baxter landing in the hospital when he has allowed a couple of people to shoot potatoes at a can on his head, sufferings wounds when hit on the cheek by an inaccurate shot.
The key activity of the movie occurs when the parents have gone missing, the police believing they are the victims of one of a string of kidnappings leading to murder. The children, thinking that this is another display of performance art, try to find what’s up. When they do discover the truth, the film hits it major twist.
This is not a dramedy that follows Judd Apatow’s vulgar histrionics or features the aggressive tomfoolery of the recent movie “The Boss.” Instead it is underplayed by Jason Bateman, the arguments with the parents reaching melodramatic proportions only in one instance. Nicole Kidman looks really good at age forty-eight passing for thirty-five, the brother-sister act with Bateman meshing nicely. Their arguments with the parents are credible despite the quirkiness of the entire film. Lindsay-Abair takes credit for scripting this oddball piece as should Kevin Wilson who invented these endearing oddballs.
Rated R. 105 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B
Overall – B
