Family Flick Has Plenty Of Laughs, And A Message
Instant Family has some laughs, tugs some heartstrings
INSTANT FAMILY
★★★ outof5
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Rose Byrne, Isabela Moner
Director: Sean Anders
Duration: 1h59m Movies are manipulation machines. It’s the reason we weep during that opening scene in Pixar’s Up.
It explains every movie in which a dog dies.
And it’s why Google, most recently in the news for being soft on sexual harassment, looks so cute and cuddly in the twohour recruitment video that was 2013’s The Internship.
Which brings us to Instant Family, in which Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne star as an affluent, childless couple who decide to adopt a foster child and end up with three. The movie plays like a public-service announcement for the U.S. adoption industry, complete with an onscreen website at the end where you can go to learn more.
That might well rub you the wrong way. But here’s the thing — emotional exploitation aside, it’s still a pretty good movie. Wahlberg and Byrne make an appealing if oddly conflict-free couple, backed by Julie Hagerty and Margo Martindale as their duelling mothers-in-law, and Octavia Spencer and comedian Tig Notaro as the remarkably unbureaucratic face of the adoption agency.
And while the younger kids don’t have much to do — one’s a temper-tantrum on a short fuse, the other can’t open his mouth without apologizing — Isabela Moner does a good job as 14-year-old Lizzy, on whom the adoptive parents decide in a spasm of guilt. (Most would-be parents are looking for an infant or toddler, which means orphan teens often wind up stuck in the foster-care system.) In addition to being the typical troubled teenager, Lizzy has suffered too much at the hands of the system to easily open up to her new parents, no matter how wellmeaning they seem. It’s a nicely nuanced performance.
I am starting to wonder about Wahlberg ’s range, however. Two Oscar nominations aside, he seems to play most characters, whether in Transformers, Lone Survivor or Ted 2, as though channelling a child who cannot wait to tell you about the new video game he just got for Christmas. In this one he goes on several long (albeit funny) rambles about adoptees, comparing them to rescue dogs, then to real-estate fixer-uppers.
Instant Family was directed and co-written by Sean Anders, who has a history with Wahlberg (Daddy’s Home and its sequel) and with oddball family comedies (Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg in That’s My Boy).
He also has three adopted children of his own, so you can bet we’ll be invited to laugh (and cry) along with the main characters rather than at them.
There are enough yuks to make this more than a very long testimonial, and damned if I didn’t tear up a little in some of the final scenes. Instant Family has the ability to foster a contact high in its viewers, which is what the medium has always been about.