The Family Fang

Dubai International Film Festival DIFF 2015 Official Selection

(still of Bateman and Kidman in The Family Fang)

The Family Fang is an upcoming adaptation of the 2011 bestselling novel of the same name by Kevin Wilson. The story revolves around two siblings Buster and Annie Fang, a writer and actress respectively, who are attempting to lead normal lives despite the oddball pair of performance artists they have as their parents called Caleb and Camille.

The siblings, played by Jason Bateman (Arrested Development, Horrible Bosses) and Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole, Paddington) have been referred to Child A and Child B their entire lives. As kids, they have been forced by Caleb and Camille to stage robberies, use fake blood, perform a song called “Kill All Parents” in public and even kiss each other as Romeo and Juliette in a school play sending their teacher to early retirement. We get to see all of the said performance pieces (and more) in well-placed flashbacks.

As adults, Buster has a writer’s blockage and Annie is stuck in indie film making hell. They are criticised by Caleb and Camille as lesser artists now than they were as part of the Fang assembly (“Crap movies and a tampon commercial!” is all Caleb has to say of his daughter’s career) and still get occasionally drawn into their oddball art.

Things get further complicated when the parents, played in the present day by the great Christopher Walken (Seven Psychopaths, Hairspray) and Tony Award winning actress Maryann Plunkett, decide to pull one of their most elaborate and ludicrous performance pieces yet. If this part sounds too good to be true, it’s only because it is.

The Fangs are a celebrity family much like we might have had if Marina Abramovic and her ex-partner Ulay had ever decided to have children and use them as props. The script by Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire (Rabbit Hole, Shrek the Musical) is, like the novel, at its best when it focuses on the crazy shenanigans of the senior Fangs. Performance art is still relatively new, not really a part of pop culture just yet, and The Family Fang takes a particular delight in being a bit of a cinematic pioneer in that regard. It’s also extremely hard to imagine anyone else playing these roles as good as Walken and Plunkett do.

But as we get to the newest Fang performance, the film begins to drag. The big art piece (or is it?) of Caleb and Camille takes them both out of the film for long stretches of time leaving Buster and Annie to provide us with all the entertainment. Bateman does a good job with his more fragile character and along with this year’s The Gift he has proved himself to be quite the force of nature, but his writer’s blockage is simply boring. The circumstances of Kidman’s character’s life are perhaps more original but they are vaguely presented and the actress has a hard time selling the character who is clearly supposed to be much younger than she is.

So, we are left with the siblings sitting in dark rooms, moping around the house, doing research and arguing about what is the best course of action. It begins to feel like something more appropriate for cable TV, which probably explains why the film has been picked up for distribution by no one other than STARZ premium cable. It also doesn’t help that Bateman, who serves here as a director following his 2013 debut Bad Words, has yet to acquire a particular style and, together with his cinematographer Ken Seng, makes the story look far gloomier and drearier on screen than it really needed to be.

This family deserved better.

6.5/10