‘Instant Family’ is a problematic adoption comedy
It starts almost as a lark. A childless, middle-age couple suddenly wants kids, but they also don’t want to be the “old” parents who have to shuffle to their kid’s high school graduation ceremony with a walker. Wouldn’t it be funny, they say, if we just adopted a 5-yearold? Then it will be like we got a head start!
It sounds like shaky ground on which to expand a family, but it’s the real-life scenario that inspired “Instant Family.” Director Sean Anders (“Daddy’s Home”) is himself an adoptive father to three siblings out of foster care, and he drew from his own experiences to co-write a comedy about the joys and terrors of foster parenting. The result is too wellmeaning and sincere to truly dislike, but too frictionless and manufactured to do right by the complicated scenario.
Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne play Pete and Ellie, house flippers who take their can-do renovation gusto into the foster care system. They are immediately taken with Lizzy (Isabela Moner), a headstrong teenager (is there any other kind?) who comes with equal parts baggage and heart.
That baggage includes two younger siblings: emotional and easily bruised Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and cutie-pie baby sister Lita (Julianna Gamiz), whose tantrums would put the fear of God in Linda Blair. Abandonment issues run deep in the kids, who were taken from their biological mother because of drug addiction, and an ethnic divide adds an extra layer of complexity. It’s more than
‘Instant Family’
Sean Anders Mark Wahlberg, Rose Byrne. they bargained for, but Pete and Ellie have the love to spare, and so they dive into the deep end.
“Instant Family” can sometimes feel like a primer instead of a piece of entertainment, taking the audience through the myriad bureaucratic steps of foster parenting, from the application process to the final hearing in family court. But its dullest stretches are buoyed by a murderers’ row of riotous actresses and comedians: Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro as odd-couple social workers; mouse-voiced Julie Hagerty and boisterous Margo Martindale as grandmothers; and when it seems like it can’t possibly get any better, the great Joan Cusack makes a surprise third-act appearance.
Comedy doesn’t always suit the subject matter, unfortunately. “Instant Family” tries to get in front of its optics problem by having Ellie and Pete voice their concerns about developing a “white savior” complex by adopting three Hispanic children. Anders is clearly cognizant of the potential negative interpretations and tries to get in front of them by having Spencer, a black woman, assure the couple of their purity of their intentions. It could not be more transparent.
The couple’s good intentions, and the film’s, aren’t in question. Anders’ heart is clearly in the right place. But a broad studio comedy doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance or the space to unpack the intricacies of interracial adoption. Instead, it places the viewer in a position of actively rooting for a Spanish-speaking mother of three to relapse into addiction, so the nice white couple can keep her kids.
The sincerity is palpable, but a throwaway line from Spencer does not absolve the societal dysfunction on display, nor does the Herculean comedic lift of so many fine actresses. Even when “Instant Family” is entertaining, such complex subject matter is failed by rote formula.