This year, a couple of high-profile streaming romances have shared a certain theme: A slightly older woman falls for a younger celebrity, to the displeasure of her young adult daughter.
So, hooray??
Really, I do applaud the older woman representation which is probably long overdue. But, I’m not convinced putting all your eggs in the mother-daughter conflict basket is really the way to go in a romance.
The plot
One such movie is A Family Affair (terrible title), the story of Zara Ford (Joey King), who is the beleaguered and irritable assistant to Hollywood A-list movie star, Chris Cole (Zach Efron). When Chris goes looking for his AWOL assistant one day, he meets her beautiful widowed mother, Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman), a Didion-esque writer suffering from writer’s block. And the two hit it off and start dating!
This is the extent of their romantic conflict.
The meddling daughter
The wrench in the works is Zara’s concern that Chris is an insecure player who will break her mother’s heart.
Yes, I guess Zara has a legitimate reason to feel concerned since she knows her boss is a philanderer. But come on! Your mother is, like, 60 years old or something!! And it seems like she hasn’t dated in roughly 20 years. Just let the woman have some fun! Sure, she might get hurt, but she’s old enough to take care of her own emotional life at this point. Just warn her about it and leave it at that.
This movie is more fun than The Idea of You (which has a similar theme), but somehow Joey King missed the memo. She is simply a bore with all of her ranting and raving. “Oh, I hate my job! Oh I hate my boss! Oh I hate that my mother is dating and having sex and having a much better time than I am!!”.
The story does deal with her selfishness – it’s a main plot point. But is this a romance or a coming-of-age drama? I’m sorry, but the latter is really, truly uninteresting.
Facing distractions
One would hope that the age-gap pairing of Nicole Kidman and Zach Efron might conjure a bit of heat. But, not so much.
Kidman is so ephemeral as the doe-eyed widow that she seems in danger of evaporating off the screen. And while Efron makes more of an impression (more on that in a second), it never really works.
It was just hard for me to imagine these two as actual lovers! Instead, I kept imagining the actors comparing notes on plastic surgeons between takes. Their strange faces undercut any possible age-gap drama the movie might have offered since they appeared to be roughly the same age.
Zach Efron
I’m not trying to be mean. Really. I feel for stars like Zach Efron who achieve pinnacles of success so early, then spend the rest of their lives struggling to live up to that level of expectation.
And actually, it is Efron – whose charms I’ve never quite succumbed to in the past – who steals the show. He is by far the most fascinating thing about this movie. When he’s not in a scene, you wish he was. He manages to find a playful tone while portraying an unlikeable neurotic, so kudos to him for walking that (jaw)line.
But is it a romance, really?
But the real problem with this film isn’t the ranting and raving or strange faces. The problem is, it isn’t really a romance.
A romance requires a conflict between two people who are in love or are falling in love. But this movie portrays a conflict between a mother and her daughter; there’s next to no conflict between the romantic pair.
Instead, the main storyline is Zara and how she handles the relationship between her mother and her boss. Zara is the one who learns and grows, Zara is the one whose change resolves the conflict.
The primary romantic conflict is external
Yes, yes – Brooke and Chris do face a conflict, but that conflict is Zara. If she wasn’t in the story, there would be no story.
This is a good example of external conflict, since a source beyond the couple is getting in the way of the relationship. The other option is internal conflict, in which the romance is blocked by the couples’ personalities and weaknesses.
External conflict is and will always be a weak driver for a romance – because it doesn’t give the romantic couple any agency or control over their outcome, and it doesn’t give them anywhere to grow.
More about agency
Zara does finally realize the error of her ways… Hooray!! But before Brooke and Chris can find happiness together, Zara has to give her mother the okay… Kind of like Triton giving Ariel her legs at the end of The Little Mermaid (Gee, look, my dad just gave me genitals!!).
But our romantic leads have no agency if someone else has to give them permission to be in love – without agency, they’re nothing but NPCs (i.e. non-playing characters, for other unhip oldies like me). They just don’t seem real. And who cares about what happens to characters who don’t seem real?
Conclusion
Focusing on an older demographic in a romance is refreshing. (Or is the word I’m looking for ‘pandering’?)
But, maybe these rom-com mothers need to stop caring so much about what their daughters think.
Or maybe I’m wrong.
In a romance that features a young woman, she’s at a point in life where she’s finding independence.
But, a middle-aged mother has different ambitions. She wants to keep her children close as they leave the nest. A mother might do what she has to do to stay on her child’s good side, even if that means forsaking love.
So maybe these stories about mothers turning away from romance to please their children aren’t so unreasonable.
The problem is, they’re just not very romantic.
So quit pretending they’re romances.