The Family Fang

Synopsis: Growing up in the Fang family, siblings Annie (Mackenzie Brooke Smith) and Baxter (Jack McCarthy) were referred to by their performance artist parents as Child A and Child B and were forced to be involved in their elaborately staged, often dangerous public art pieces. Years later, Annie (Nicole Kidman) is a scandal-plagued actress and Baxter (Jason Bateman) is a struggling novelist two years behind on delivering his second book. When their parents, Caleb (Christopher Walken) and Camille (Maryann Plunkett) suddenly go missing in suspicious circumstances, the police fear that they have fallen victim to a roadside killer, but Annie and Baxter suspect it’s just another elaborate hoax.

Early on in Jason Bateman’s second go around as both actor and director, the standing of the Fang‘s work as performance artists and its public notoriety is debated between two New York art critics (Steven Witting and Scott Shepherd) in a funny, but stylistically self-conscious scene that attempts to lend some kind of cultural cred to what, for me, is one of the weaknesses of this film. The supposedly cutting edge performance art pieces we see (including the opening scene where the family stage a fake bank robbery) feel so much more like sophisticated undergraduate pranks, that it’s hard to afford them the status that the story requires in order for us to understand the creative purity and artistic idealism that drives Caleb to such extreme behaviour and all ‘round bad parenting.

Caleb and Camille Fang are no Ulay and Marina Abramovic and the Fang’s ‘art’ doesn’t even work as a parody of that pair’s audacious performance art works (although the idea of Ulay and Abramovic having children that they involve in their public pieces is a tantalising one) so the moral question of whether the involvement of Annie and Baxter in these performances was artistic inspiration or just child abuse seems moot. What that leaves the film with is a floundering narrative about two eccentric, self-indulgent parents who like to dress up with their kids and video themselves doing silly stuff. It’s funny (at times) but doesn’t amount to as much as the film seems to want it to.  Contrast this with another dysfunctional family from earlier this year; Matt Ross’ Captain Fantastic, in which the father’s philosophical outlook impacting on his family is so clearly and authentically defined and allows a funny story to find emotional depth and significance..

The second disappointment in this film is that a strong cast is saddled with playing largely selfish and unsympathetic characters.  I found it hard to empathize with any of these characters with the possible exception of Camille who has the strongest and most emotionally-engaging story, even if it isn’t allowed to sit in the foreground for very long.  Walken is, as always, eminently watchable and relishes in playing the darker sides of Caleb but Kidman and Bateman feel stranded in the story, hamstrung by their own psychoses and emotional disengagement which undermines the, admittedly, surprise ending when the question of whether Caleb and Camille have been brutally murdered or are just playing a spiteful prank is finally answered.

Yes, there are some funny moments in The Family Fang – the scene where Baxter is shown how to use a high-powered potato gun with disastrous consequences is very funny – and some of the pranks, whilst not works of art, are still very entertaining  Oddly, though, these funny moments seem to work counter to the heat of the story. Whether it’s due to Bateman’s direction or David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s novel, or whether it’s that both Bateman and Kidman have producer credits it feels like this is a film that needed a harder edge and sharper, more caustic wit.

 

 

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