There’s gonna be damage in this ‘Family Fang’
“The Family Fang” tells the story of a pair of performance artists for whom everything in life became part of their act and of the affect of that attitude on their two (now-adult) children.
This elegantly structured adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s best-selling 2011 novel opens with a flashback. In the family car, parents Caleb and Camille are preparing their kids — Annie and Baxter — for something. Caleb is dressed as a police officer, and Baxter, roughly age 5, is asking if he can taste the fake blood again.
Then suddenly, we’re in a bank, where young Baxter is waving a gun and staging a holdup to gain access to the teller’s lollipop jar. Bystanders watch in horror as the bizarre scene unfolds.
There’s a shooting, followed by tears — and then laughter, as the performers come clean about the ruse and relish the chaos they’ve created.
As viewers may expect by now, the family’s future is not all rosy, especially
for the kids.
Now grown up, Annie (Nicole Kidman) is an actress with a reputation for wild behavior, who has become less interesting with sobriety. Formerly an indie darling, she is now known for a string of third-rate rom-coms, and is trying to stage a comeback.
Baxter (Jason Bateman, who also directs the film) is a novelist who published one impressive book and a middling follow-up, but is now two years over deadline for delivering his next tome to a publisher.
An accident and a hospital stay bring the siblings together again and reunite them with their parents (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett, but played in the bank scene by Jason Butler Harner and Kathryn Hahn).
The accidental reunion is alternately fraught and comforting, but things turn volatile when Annie and Baxter refuse to participate in yet another stunt with Caleb and Camille.
That stunt goes bad. Caleb freaks out, and soon afterward, he and Camille have gone missing. A distressing meeting with the police makes the siblings wonder whether the disappearance is for real or just another act.
While Baxter resigns himself to the idea that his parents are actually dead, Annie becomes obsessed with the idea that they’re alive. The two damaged siblings mine both past traumas and present complications to try to arrive at the truth.
The film brims with big ideas about art, expression, authenticity and family — which Pulitzerwinning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire weaves seamlessly into a briskly paced story, where flashbacks feel like perfectly timed reveals.
Bateman, back in the director’s seat after his 2013 feature debut “Bad Words,” may not have a fully developed cinematic sense yet, but he sure knows how to capture performances, even if he’s just letting his actors do their own thing.
Walken is a standout as the art-obsessed patriarch, mercilessly indifferent to his family but empathetic for his lofty artistic ambitions. Bateman, too, is in top form in an emotionally resonant performance.
The one false note is from Kidman, whose Annie is terrific on her own — especially in some early scenes on the set of a film and then in conversation with a journalist.
But she seems woefully out of place with the rest of the Fangs, and not just because Kidman struggles to conceal her Aussie accent. Her detachment detracts from the emotional core of the relationship with the Bateman character.
For a story bursting with ideas about radical art, the film ultimately turns rather conventional. But that’s OK. Too many smart literary adaptations get bogged down in whimsy. The makers of “The Family Fang” know this story is peculiar enough all by itself.