For my money, Richard LaGravenese’s A Family Affair, which has been roundly pilloried by critics, is the most underrated film of 2024 so far. On the face of it, Carrie Solomon’s screenplay might sound a bit on the nose – Zac Efron plays Chris Cole, a Marvel-like actor who fires his producer Zara Ford (Joey King) only to fall in love with her mother Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman), a widow and famous writer, who seeks advice both from her daughter and her mother-in-law Leila Ford (Kathy Bates). But this is an urbane comedy that harkens back to the blockbuster crowdpleasers of the 2000s, suffused with an inherent and immediate watchability and a wonderful sense of buoyancy, momentum and cinematic jouissance. In his 1991 review, Roger Ebert paid the remake of Father of the Bride a compliment – “just everyday life, warmly observed” – and A Family Affair is that kind of film too. Of course, Father of the Bride wasn’t everyday life in any strict sense, unfolding in what was at that point the most gated community in California, San Marino, and A Family Affair is no different. Yet LaGravenese’s film belongs to a charmingly Hollywoodised vision of everyday life that has become quite rare now, along with an old-fashioned sense of Hollywood as “the business.” It recalls an older celebrity aura, a time when the private lives of actors were more intriguing and fascinating, especially when they were dramatised and projected onto the silver screen.

Key to that old-fashioned style is LaGravenese’s ability to imbue his film with a cosy domesticity that was once the province of multiplex Hollywood. Brooke’s house is the kind of sprawling suburban Los Angeles house that typically stood in for private life during films of the 90s and 00s, and its many nooks, corners and vestibules play a major role in contouring the narrative trajectory. For one thing, Chris first meets Brooke while she’s doing spring cleaning, with a Blondie album pumped up as high as the volume can go. She leaves the door open, he doesn’t realise she’s at home (he’s there to see Zara) and so the duo spend a fair amount of time wandering through the house before their paths finally cross. In a very real way, the house mediates their relationship to each other, along with countless other moments in the film, which in turn takes on the remarkably lived-in quality that once made it possible to attach to the multiplex as a home-away-from-home. This inviting porosity is very different to the austere thresholds that characterise Chris’ property, and which evoke the more clinical spatiality of the Marvel universe. Zara regularly has to climb his fence when he forgets to open the gate and his monumental-ornamental front door is so heavy that she can barely open and close it – a dramatic contrast to the breezy openness of her mother’s abode.

Much of the narrative thrust of A Family Affair revolves around this nostalgia for an older era of Hollywood, since all three of the main characters are frustrated artist in a Marvelfied world. Chris is a Marvel actor who is sensing the end of his franchise, Zara is an aspiring producer who believes in good movies, and Brooke is an established writer who believes in good scripts. In her professional life, Zara is continually trying to push Chris towards Oscar-worthy roles, while Brooke expresses surprise that he would ever accept an unsatisfactory role merely for the sake of perpetuating a franchise. While Chris himself is not quite so idealistic in the early stages of the film, there is a part of him that inchoately yearns for something more, as when he insists that he is a “movie star” rather than a mere celebrity, influencer or content creator.

While A Family Affair may have been released on the Netflix platform, then, it quite resolutely does not feel like a Netflix film – it’s too restlessly nostalgia for the big screen for that. The focus of the film may be domestic but this is domesticity mediated through the multiplex rather than the small screen, and middle class life figured at the scale of the multiplex, full of cavernous yet intimate living rooms. Conversely, the film affirms the multiplex as portal to a fantasy of the good life that seems less tenable amidst the immediate domestic address of Netflix, when you can actually look around and judge the difference between the living room on the screen and the living room (if you still even have a living room) where you are watching it. In other words, LaGravenese’s film evokes an era when there was still a threshold of fantasy between screen and life, a threshold that became continuous with an entire canon of upscale LA suburbia, as endemic to the multiplex era as the Hollywood Hills were to the 40s and 50s.

The last film I remember exuding this feel-good fantasia was Bridesmaids, and there’s some cognate between Rose Byrne’s awry performance in that film and Kidman’s wonderfully screwy performance here, which is only enhanced by LaGravenese and Solomon permitting her character to be an Australian-American immigrant. By allowing Kidman to luxuriate in a space between her Australian and American accents, the film as a whole harkens back to some of her best earlier performances, when her Aussie background was still fresh. That authenticity also ensures that Kidman’s screwiness is never ridiculous or carnivalesque – there’s no sense that an older woman dating a younger man is inverting the regular order of things, an even defter achievement in that the central joke of the film is that Efron, the teen icon for several successive generations, is now indisputably an adult, irrevocably in the same category of people as Kidman. Far from being some voyeuristic exercise in abject older womanhood, when the couple break up midway through, it’s genuinely moving and affecting.

All this old-school Hollywood craft works to create a real chemistry and tenderness between the two leads, making for a film that is genuinely romantic, without the slightest trace of irony or arch detachment. At times, this takes us away from comedy altogether, and into the burnished realm of New Hollywood romance, most memorably in an extended montage sequence in which Chris and Brooke spend a cloudy wintry weekend at his beach house, huddling up against the fire pit, taking long walks along the sand against a stormy sky, and retreating to their innermost selves as solace against the coldness outside. Their romance is saturated with classical Hollywood allusions too, most beautifully in a scene when Chris suggests a walk after a date, Brooke questions where they can possibly walk in LA, and Chris takes her to the New York set on the Hollywood backlot, where they cosy up on the steps of a brownstone façade as the camera pulls back to a fake movie theatre down the street playing George Stevens’ The More The Merrier. Stevens’ 1943 screwball film riffs on the World War II housing crisis by piling ever more people into an apartment in Washington D.C., and LaGravenese’s film also yearns for this big-screen closeness that eludes Netflix immediacy. 

In contrast to the cheesiness of the Hallmark-Netflix model, A Family Affair thus excels at sentiment, in the profoundest sense, embroidering its story with one beautiful moment after another between Chris, Zara, Brooke and Leila. These relationships also evolve, since both Brooke and Zara genuinely know Chris in different ways, meaning that their connection develops and deepens by way of the romance too. Zara may be a bit bratty at first but she bounces back by turning into a kind of parent figure to both Chris and her mother, bringing them back together at the end without reducing them to a novelty act, a gesture that feels continuous with her getting Chris out of Marvel for good and breaking Brooke’s writing block too. “You’ve produced us,” Brooke notes, when Zara arranges for her and Chris to meet at a supermarket, and her words are truer than she realises, since Zara has hired out the supermarket, populated it with extras who have been instructed not to recognise Chris, and orchestrated grocery mist inside and booming thunder outside to bring the moment to its romantic conclusion. In another film, this ending might seem arch, or ironic, or deflatingly meta. Here, however, it plays more as a testament to the craft needed to make sentiment and sincerity ramify in just the right way, along with the craft needed to pair an older woman with a younger man without a hint of sadism. It’s a beautiful ending to the most underrated film of 2024, a yearning tribute to the space that once spread out between us and the screen.