Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A family affair.
Aaron Epstein/Netflix
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Aaron Epstein/Netflix
About seven minutes into the new Netflix romantic comedy A family affairZac Efron, playing a conceited, not-so-bright movie star who's just broken up with his girlfriend, nags his assistant (played by Joey King) to go pick up his stuff from his ex-girlfriend. He's left some precious things there, he explains. He's left his signed Jordans! He's left his Himalayan T-shirt! And then he says, seriously, as if to indicate the urgency of the mission, “I left my copy of The courage to not be liked.” And I said, in my living room, “Ha!”
The courage to not be liked is a real book. It's not really an endorsement of the habit of being a jerk; it's more nuanced than thatBut this character, without an ounce of self-awareness, laments the disappearance of a book called The courage to not be liked? That's a really good joke, really well delivered by Efron. He goes on to say, “I have different pairs of underwear there. And people are selling them.”
Eventually, the movie star, named Chris, has too much of a fight with the assistant, named Zara, and he has to go find her to make amends. But when he goes to her house, he finds her mother, Brooke (Nicole Kidman), a beautiful widow and writer who lives in the kind of gorgeous and stylish house that has featured in most of the best Nancy Meyers movies. (It's a far cry from Chris's house, which is equally chic but also ugly and impractical, as evidenced by an effective little segment about his absurd front door.) Brooke and Chris start drinking tequila, they hit it off, and Zara, who lives at home and has few boundaries with her mother, eventually catches them upstairs in Brooke's bedroom.
Zara's dismay over her mother's relationship with Chris isn't about the age difference (which mostly goes undiscussed), but about the fact that she's seen Chris go through his girlfriend-dumping routine enough times to worry that her mother might be hurt. What follows in Carrie Solomon's script is one part romance between Chris and Brooke, one part ongoing clash between Chris and Zara, and one part mother-daughter story about Zara and Brooke. And honestly, in director Richard LaGravenese's film, it all works pretty well!
Joey King as Zara Ford and Zac Efron as Chris Cole in A family affair.
Tina Rowden/Netflix
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
Some of these things – particularly an older woman getting into a relationship with a younger male celebrity – may bring to mind the recent film The idea of youin which Anne Hathaway fell for a boy band member played by Nicholas Galitzine. I didn’t like that movie at all, partly because it wasn’t funny enough, partly because the romance wasn’t convincing, and partly because the ending had no emotional resonance. (It was based on a book that ended completely differently, and it turns out that you can’t just take a carefully constructed story and turn the ending on its head and have it make sense.) That book wasn’t written as a rom-com, it was adapted and shoved into the rom-com box. This, on the other hand, is meant to be a rom-com — and it shows.
Efron is a much more successful, charismatic and (especially) funnier leading actor than Galitzine (who I played in Red, White and Royal Blue) opposite Hathaway in The idea of you. And it's refreshing to see Kidman happily kissing someone, at least temporarily breaking out of the tormented-sad-person rut she's been in for the past few years. Chris' relationship with Brooke feels real and brings out the beautiful in both of them, starting when she explains the Icarus myth so he can understand its connections to his film franchise, Icarus Attackwhom she's never met before. He certainly seems like a dope at first (“I'm Australian.” “Oh, do you know Margot Robbie?” “…No.” “I do.”), but as he gets more comfortable, he grows on Brooke, and is also, you know, very attractive.
Back in 2012, I wrote that Efron was an interesting role to follow in the footsteps of someone like Ryan Gosling. (At that time, in his mid-twenties, Efron was starring in a Nicholas Sparks film.) Gosling was also once a Disney kid, and he managed to grow into a very good dramatic actor, a very good comedic actor, and a very sultry romantic lead. Efron has no Oscar nominations yet, but he was excellent in a purely dramatic role in The Iron Claw in 2023, and he's funny enough here as the willfully goofy hunk that he could have been a pretty great Ken if Gosling hadn't been available — or a good Fall Guy.
King is a established Netflix romcom leader herself, but she does a great job here too. Besides the romance, the storyline of Zara discovering that the world doesn’t revolve around her alone, even in her relationship with her mother, is especially welcome. In a scene with her grandmother, played (as always expertly) by Kathy Bates, Zara begins to realize what we all ultimately must: your parents aren’t just your parents, they’re people with lives, thoughts, and desires that have nothing to do with you. She also has an honest moment with her best friend (Liza Koshy), about her problems that aren’t at the center of the universe, which gives the entire final act a very nice “What if someone had forcefully told Rory Gilmore to get over herself?” quality.
Nicole Kidman as Brooke Harwood in A family affair.
Tina Rowden/Netflix
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Tina Rowden/Netflix
It’s too early to declare a golden age of streaming rom-coms, because the ones we do get are still wildly uneven, and on cable, it’s not like they ever went away. But there’s some star power here, and some budget, and some writing and direction, that suggests interest in the genre is gaining traction, and delivering good results.
