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How entertaining? ★★★★☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 1 January 2016
A movie review of THE FAMILY FANG. |
“You’re in a weird place? I got shot in the head with a potato,” Buster Fang (Jason Bateman)
Akin to CHINATOWN, Buster spends a significant proportion of the runtime cranially bandaged. On a magazine assignment, he drunkenly volunteers for a William Tell moment: Replace the crossbow with a homemade potato bazooka and some hillbillies, and the result is a perforated eardrum. The classic gumshoe noir analogy can be stretched further, when his parents go missing attempts are made to unravel the mystery.
Akin to CHINATOWN, Buster spends a significant proportion of the runtime cranially bandaged. On a magazine assignment, he drunkenly volunteers for a William Tell moment: Replace the crossbow with a homemade potato bazooka and some hillbillies, and the result is a perforated eardrum. The classic gumshoe noir analogy can be stretched further, when his parents go missing attempts are made to unravel the mystery.
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Not resting on his criminally under-seen comedy gem, BAD WORDS, Bateman returns to the director’s chair for a sophomore work perhaps greater in ambition but not as satisfying. Kudos for the genre segue; humour merges into melodrama seamlessly.
Three time periods are chopped up across the 105-minute runtime:
- As adults, Buster and sister Annie (Nicole Kidman) are far from well-adjusted, and are reluctantly thrown back into the mix with their estranged parents, father Caleb (Christopher Walken – always a pleasure to see his characters lose their cool, it has been awhile) and mother Camille (Maryann Plunkett).
- A documentary on the family Fang, providing commentary and context.
- The family in youthful days, when Caleb (here Jason Butler Harner) and Camille (Kathryn Hahn) were at the peak of their fame, as divisive artists/pranksters playing tricks on an unsuspecting public. Roping in their children the performance pieces did not offer the kids a welcome alternative childhood of fond happy memories, rather a scarring of perpetual embarrassment.
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Being messed up by your parents might have been a universal story, told in extremes, but the plot is so out there that empathy is hard to grasp. However, those weaned on reality shows (of the Osbourne and Kardashian variety) might get with the (minor) celebrity dysfunction on display. Having little choice but to recuperate from the spud incident, Buster is joined by notorious movie actress sibling Annie, fresh from a tabloid cover story of on-set breast flashing. Humour close to the bone, the boob scoop is discussed frankly at dinner to embarrassing effect. Laugh-out-loud catharsis is not on the agenda. Neither is the watch-through-your fingers social situation excruciation. Somewhere in between THE FAMILY FANG sits, teasing articulate jests and observations, but not completely having a handle on either. A melancholy compulsion masks a lack of profundity.
Those who consider themselves artists are in the filmmakers’ crosshairs. The fallout provides the meat, except there is not quite enough of it. Still, Bateman is now a director of real note.
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