Working with family can be a challenging process, bringing personal drama into a professional setting with the potential to disrupt productivity at work and then transmit office problems back home. But plenty of people do it, and somehow they make it work, even if maybe it’s not the healthiest choice. Family Movie is a very meta collaboration, put together by four people who are in fact related playing exaggerated versions of themselves, demonstrating that, considering the reality that they do still talk to each other and are happy with the finished product, sometimes family really can be the best partners for success.
Jack Smith (Kevin Bacon) is a director who has been making horror movies for years, often starring his family, and one critic has panned them all. In his latest, he’s behind the camera again, with his wife Elle (Kyra Sedgwick) playing a villain alongside Jackie (Jackie Earle Haley), and his daughter Ulla (Sosie Bacon) as their sacrificial victim. His son Travis (Travis Bacon) is helping out on the production side, but things keep getting delayed by the barking of the dog owned by the Smiths’ unfriendly neighbor Bill (John Caroll Lynch). When Elle goes over to have a talk with Bill, things quickly take a turn and the Smith family is forced to get along long enough to clean up this constantly-worsening mess.
This is not the first time that the Bacon family has worked together on a project, but it is the first time all four of them are playing the same parts relative to one another. It’s an idea that came out of boredom during COVID lockdown, and fortunately, everyone involved was game to make it happen. Obviously this isn’t how their dynamics truly play out, but it is fun to see hints of how they might interact in real life wrapped into the performances they deliver and the ways in which they talk to each other. Everyone is clearly having a blast, and they’re channeling a shared love of horror into this comedy that pokes fun at genre tropes while still including and honoring them.
Just last year, Kevin and Kyra reunited for the romantic comedy The Best You Can, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival, and it’s a delight to see how they play off each other once again after almost thirty-eight years of marriage. Bacon has established a reputation over the years for the kind of characters he plays, and this is among his least showy and successful, drained by years of trying to do something worthwhile and never really seeing anything come of it. Sedgwick, probably best known for her focused performance on The Closer, is doing something much lighter in the best way, portraying an overprotective mother who will stop at nothing to keep her children safe and happy. They’re both effortlessly good, and these characters feel like people who could just as easily have been them if they weren’t nearly as talented.
The Bacon children have charted impressive careers for themselves, with Sosie appearing in horror movies and anchoring the underrated Prime Video series As We See It and Travis making a dent in the music industry. Their characters are also reflective of earlier setbacks that children of people in the movie business might encounter, and it’s fun to see how they relate both to each other and to the parents they don’t really want to share anything with even though that’s always what they’ve done. Their futures are surely promising, mostly since they don’t have to contend with the repeated family failures like their characters do.
The supporting cast of this film, though not related by blood to the four stars, is just as great, with Haley sending up the reputation of a character actor and Lynch going for the most despicable, button-pushing neighbor possible. Liza Koshy is appropriately irritating as a budding filmmaker with too much access to the set, and Andrea Savage is typically funny as Ulla’s pushy manager. Family Movie may not be an instant classic, but it’s also not trying to be. It is, assuredly and fortunately, leagues better than whatever Jack has put out into this film’s fictional world, a fun experiment in family filmmaking that knows just what it wants to be and delivers a reliably entertaining experience for audiences.
Movie Rating: 7/10
