Imagine having Andy Kaufman and Yoko Ono as your parents. That’s close to the childhood endured by two now-grown siblings, Annie and Baxter Fang.
They haven’t gotten over it yet.
The Fang kids, played by Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman, are the main characters in “The Family Fang,” a new film adapted from a novel by Kevin Wilson. Their parents were avant-garde performance artists who perfected the put-on.
The movie, directed by Bateman, begins with a childhood vignette to illustrate their methods: a pretend bank robbery, in which parents and children together stage a fake shoot-out. By leading with this creepy and irresponsible stunt, the movie sets a fittingly uneasy note.
As adults, Annie is a successful actress who can’t stay out of the tabloids, and Baxter is a novelist wasting his time with magazine journalism.
When Baxter gets shot in the head with a potato gun (this is actually one of the movie’s funniest scenes), Annie comes to help out. Their parents (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett) are also on hand, but not really welcome.
The folks would like to revive the old family act. Which is the last thing Baxter and Annie want.
There are rich possibilities for this curious crew, especially when you’ve got Walken flying into high gear whenever he feels like elucidating the theoretical underpinnings of his art, blah blah blah.
Walken has a monologue about the artist Chris Burden, who notoriously suffered a gunshot wound as part of an art performance in 1971. For the Fang family patriarch, this is far too tame—a conviction Walken brings off with his trademark otherworldliness.
“The Family Fang” is Bateman’s second film as director (after the nasty-funny “Bad Words”), and he’s obviously drawn to comedy with a bite. The material here walks a tricky line between comedy and tragedy, although his decision to play the material in a realistic way doesn’t feel right. Maybe this needed to be a little more artificial.
You wonder whether Bateman, a child star with a showbiz sister (Justine, from the hit 80s series “Family Ties”), glommed onto this material for its autobiographical connections. Baxter and Annie are visibly pained whenever anybody wants to talk to them about their very public youth.
Bateman and Kidman probably sound unlikely as siblings, but they’re surprisingly good together. In another movie, they’d be an intriguing duo.
“The Family Fang” 2 1/2 stars
Jason Bateman directs and stars in this adaptation of Kevin Wilson’s novel, about siblings (Bateman and Nicole Kidman) who still bear the trauma of being raised in a family of avant-garde performance artists. The movie’s style is too realistic to nail the blend of comedy and tragedy, but Christopher Walken has some fine moments as the family patriarch.
Rating: R, for language
Showing: Sundance Cinemas
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