Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman connect beautifully.
An atonal chorus of “Kill all parents!,” fervently sung by two adolescent siblings eager to please their mom and dad, reverberates throughout the tonally shifting dramedy The Family Fang. Based on Kevin Wilson’s darkly comic 2011 novel, the film balances precariously on an outlandish premise: Husband-and-wife performance artists Caleb and Camille Fang (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett) stage and film living-theater pieces that conceptually manipulate reality in everyday settings, such as an engineered high school production of Romeo and Juliet pairing brother and sister as the star-crossed lovers. But the ultimate ick factor in these experimental art pieces is the required participation of their two young offspring, Annie and Baxter, otherwise objectively referred to as “Child A” and “Child B.”
It’s a childhood tailor-made for an adult life on the therapist’s couch, as the grownup Annie (Nicole Kidman) and Baxter (Jason Bateman, who also directs) struggle in their own fashion with the psychic wounds of an unorthodox upbringing. For most of the film, Bateman manages to bring out the two principals’ anguish without resorting to sentimentality, until the last quarter of the film, when things get gooey as an empowered brother and sister literally walk hand-in-hand in emotional solidarity. But in a scene in which their characters engage in a quiet, tear-filled conversation about the futility of changing the past through the present, Bateman and Kidman connect beautifully. For the siblings, it’s a moment of clarity in a lifetime of familial dysfunction.
