Sometimes, and maybe more and more, the pleasure of flicks lies within the small issues. The congenial Netflix romantic comedy A Household Affair, written by newcomer Carrie Solomon and directed by Richard LaGravenese, a veteran director and screenwriter who is aware of what he’s doing, mines some territory that’s already acquainted from a film launched earlier this yr: An “older” single mom tumbles into an affair with a a lot youthful man, inviting judgment and mock from these round her. We simply noticed that concept, performed out slightly delightfully, in The Concept of You, starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine. In A Household Affair, it’s Nicole Kidman’s profitable author Brooke Harwood who falls for full-of-himself film star Chris Cole (Zac Efron), although there’s an extra complication: Brooke’s daughter Zara (Joey King) is Chris’ private assistant, and she will’t stand him.
You possibly can complain that two films riffing on the identical theme, launched inside just a few months of each other, is maybe one film too many. (The thought additionally figures in French filmmaker Catherine Breillat’s advantageous erotic drama Final Summer season, which premiered at Cannes in 2023 and is simply now making its means into U.S. theaters.) Or you may see this mini-trend as proof that a number of filmmakers are choosing up the identical scent from the air: ladies over 50 don’t need to be discarded; they need to be seen, appreciated, liked. The thought is so easy that you just surprise why folks haven’t been making 5 films like this a yr, for the previous 50 years. However right here we’re: the older-woman-younger-man factor remains to be such a novelty that we virtually can’t consider our eyes once we see it.
A Household Affair opens with Zara reaching the top of her rope with the infantile, demanding Chris, the bulked-up and stuck-up star of successful action-fantasy franchise. He’s in a restaurant, about to interrupt up with a candy, if bland, girlfriend who’s anticipating a wedding proposal. His parting present is a pair of diamond earrings—good work if you will get it—however he doesn’t have them on his particular person. They’re in Zara’s bag, and he or she’s caught in usually horrible Los Angeles site visitors. Lastly, she makes the supply, and Chris, callous and clueless, does the deed. Zara collects him to drive him house, and he wriggles within the passenger seat clapping alongside to Cher’s “I Consider in Love” because it blares from the automotive stereo, feeling each beat in his chilly, hole, but additionally undeniably rambunctious coronary heart. Zara rolls her eyes.
Later, they argue. He fires her, or she quits, it’s arduous to inform which. However Chris likes Zara, and he wants her. Hoping to get her again, he goes to her home, or, slightly, the not-so-shabby home she shares along with her mom, Brooke, who’s ever-so-glamorously dusting her bookshelves to the strains of Blondie’s “Dreaming” when Chris arrives. She doesn’t hear him ring the doorbell, so he walks proper in—he’s a film star, so he can do that! Even he is aware of it. After just a few screwball moments during which she ascertains that he’s not a burglar, the 2 sit down on the sofa and simply begin speaking. There’s tequila concerned, and one factor results in one other.
You’ve actually seen this type of factor earlier than, however Solomon and LaGravenese (whose resume stretches again to incorporate deeply satisfying romances like 1998’s Residing Out Loud) aren’t a lot out to freshen style conventions as to lean on their evergreen reliability. Brooke has lengthy been widowed. (She’s very shut along with her mother-in-law, performed with verve by Kathy Bates.) Zara loses it when she finds out her mom is romantically concerned along with her horrible boss, however she should study that the world doesn’t revolve round her.
The educational-the-lesson half is the place the film falters. The perfect a part of A Household Affair is the windup, the scenes during which Brooke and Chris get to know one another. On their first actual date, Chris asks Brooke if she’d prefer to go for an after-dinner stroll. “The place do you stroll in LA?” she asks. “New York!” he says brightly, as a result of within the dreamworld Los Angeles, you’re by no means removed from a soundstage. Though the repartee between Efron and Kidman is amusing sufficient—the 2 have performed lovers earlier than, within the 2012 movie The Paperboy—it might take a while to regulate to their faces. There’s been loads of Web chatter about Efron’s jawline, which has modified dramatically, in measurement and squareness, lately. Efron has been jaunty in disregarding hypothesis, claiming that he had a severe accident years in the past that required his jaw to be reattached—thus the change in form. And Kidman—properly, she’s Kidman. Possibly we have to settle for the truth that to be a fifty-something who can appeal to a thirty-something, it is advisable have semi-miraculously slowed the ravages of time your self.
However that’s Hollywood for you, and that is, in any case, a movie that takes place unapologetically in a land of fantasy. When it sparkles, which is usually, it’s completely satisfying. Efron has at all times been a terrific actor, lengthy earlier than audiences started “taking him severely,” no matter which means, in The Iron Claw. His timing is dazzling. In an early scene, he sends Zara to the grocery retailer for a particular protein powder—he’s too well-known to point out his face there himself—and he or she will get him on the telephone to ensure she’s shopping for the proper. As she pushes her cart by means of the shop, she marvels aloud on the zillion-and-one styles of Oreos within the cookie aisle. When she will get to “strawberry shortcake,” we see Chris at house, listening on his telephone, his eyes blazing like lightning bolts. “Would you like some?” Zara asks him, tentatively. “Yeah!” he says, as if he’s simply develop into hip to one of many nice wonders of the fashionable world. It’s uncertain the precise product will stay as much as that promise, however isn’t that at all times the way in which when advertising and marketing’s concerned? Later, he’ll discover the actual factor with Kidman’s Brooke. Collectively, the 2 of them are virtually too unreal for phrases. Once more, that’s Hollywood for you—a spot the place, in actual life, age is most positively not only a quantity. However we will dream, can’t we?