The laughter and tears of fostering
Instant Family 12A cert, 118 min ★★★
Dir Sean Anders
Starring Rose Byrne, Mark Wahlberg, Isabela Moner, Octavia Spencer, Tig Notaro, Margo Martindale
Instant Family has been advertised on bus-sides up and down the country with the tag-line “a feelgood movie for everyone”. Before seeing the new film by Sean Anders, I assumed a subtle play on words or double meaning was going over my head. But no – it really is just a blunt product description, like the “20 tie-top refuse sacks” label on a roll of Sainsbury’s bin liners. It’s a big, beige armchair of a studio comedy, in which Rose Byrne and Mark Wahlberg’s middle-class marrieds, Ellie and Pete Wagner, foster three adorable but testing siblings, and have their painstakingly mood-boarded lives turned back to front.
The film is based on writer-director Anders’s own experience of fostering, and successfully mines the key talking points for uncomplicated laughter and tears. These range from the daunting emotional hurdles – how should you feel when the birth mother arrives back on the scene – to lower-level nuisances such as the thoughtless comments of friends and relatives. All feel anchored in reality, and viewers with first-hand experience will probably recognise a great deal of it.
Truly seismic soul-searching and taboo-busting is in short supply – there is nothing like the same degree of introspection you might find in a Judd Apatow comedy – but there is an admirable frankness to the script, even if it feels a little self-consciously worked-on at points: every emotional outpouring comes salted with precisely placed comic asides, many of which are provided by the bone-dry social workers played by Tig Notaro and Octavia Spencer.
It’s also boosted immeasurably by Byrne and Wahlberg, who make a snappily appealing comic coupling and bounce off one another well in the film’s many fraught parenting moments. The racial difference between white parents and Latino kids is a flashpoint, and Wahlberg has a funny monologue in the agency office in which he panics about looking like he has a white saviour complex, complete with reference to Avatar.
You sense that this is a film that Anders has wanted to get out of his system for a while. Looking back over his CV, you find the two Daddy’s Home films (which also starred Wahlberg), That’s My Boy and We’re The Millers, all of which dealt with the sudden invention or revival of parent-child bonds. That makes Instant Family a relatively rare thing: a broad comedy with a genuine personal touch. RC