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Bad-parent movies are a popular comedy genre that laughs at parents for not being perfect. The drama, thriller or horror versions are more about exploring the dark side of family life and the damage that adults inflict on their young. The offbeat satire The Family Fang (2015) has its funny moments but this is not a comedy. It is a portrait of psychological abuse conducted by parents in the name of art with sinister undercurrents always beneath the surface.

Internationally renowned Caleb Fang (Christopher Walken) and his wife Camille (Maryanne Plunkett) are performance artists dedicated to disrupting the conventions of normality. They stage impromptu happenings in public places simply to witness the sublime beauty of the resulting chaos. Their children Annie (Nicole Kidman) and Baxter (Jason Bateman) have been used as performance props since they were born and their adult lives bear the scars of parenting based on artifice and deception. As youngsters they busked a song "kill all parents so you can keep living" just to get crowd reactions, but they could not foresee the truth in the lyrics nor how their parents would control their lives into adulthood.

The story unfolds backwards with Annie and Baxter at their parent's empty home searching for clues to explain the sudden and violent of disappearance of Caleb and Camille. Police believe the worst but the siblings believe it is just another stunt. While trawling through videos and other memorabilia, they see their lives paraded before them. They realise that they have always been exploited and are victims of unresolved psychological abuse. Through flashbacks, they can see Caleb as a violent personality and Camille as meekly compliant while family gatherings were tension-filled events under Caleb's domination. When the siblings question the value of the performances the reaction is pure menace.

This is a dysfunctional family in both obvious and implied ways, and the film keeps us guessing whether the knotted ball can ever be untangled. The four characters are well defined with strong and believable performances, and the conflicts between young and old are frighteningly recognisable as the kind of things that happen in both normal and transgressive families. When Caleb says "parents damage kids, so what" it sends a shiver down your spine to realise that some people are not psychologically equipped to be parents. Annie and Baxter must confront the fact that letting their parents go may the only way to grow up. This is an original take on an age-old story that is also provocative and engaging.

Annie Fang (Nicole Kidman) is struggling in her acting career and pushed into a topless scene. Her brother Baxter (Jason Bateman) is struggling with his award-winning writing and his idiot friends hit him with a potato gun. He convinces her to visit their parents (Christopher Walken, Maryann Plunkett). As young kids, their artistic parents (Jason Butler Harner, Kathryn Hahn) would perform surprise pranks on the public with them. Suddenly, their parents go missing and the siblings go in search for them.

The present-day scenes have some big names but I kept wondering if the movie would function better as a coming-of-age story with the kids and two outrageous parents. It's not that the present-day doesn't work. Kidman is wondrous. It's just that the flashbacks represent better potential. Of course, it would be a more standard movie. Going missing presents some additional interesting possibilities but the best resolution may be them actually being dead.

This Be The Verse, by Philip Larkin, opens with the lines: "They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do." The Family Fang is basically an exploration of that thesis. The parents of two damaged individuals go missing. The siblings come together to try and find them, one believing they have fallen foul of serial killers, the other thinking this is another prank in a long line of stunts their parents are famous for. All the actors do credible turns, but the themes could be explored more deeply. The revelation that the father never wanted children should impact much more heavily than it does. The waning career of Kidman's actor character seems a slight and peripheral concern. Bateman's near death-by-potato is funny, but doesn't resonate to a deeper malaise. The film carries the comedy well, but the darkness is less truthful and engaging. A spotty film, with bright moments, but I wanted more than it delivered.

This film tells the story of two siblings of behavioural artists Caleb and Camille, who have to play along to their parents cruel and traumatic pranks. After they grow up, they continue to deal with issues regarding the past, and even bigger issues in the present.

Wow. I have not expected the story to be so engaging and engrossing. It draws me in because it provokes people to think what is art and what is not art. I feel so sad for the siblings because their childhood years are traumatised repeatedly by the parents. The ending is intense and evokes much feelings in me. I liked "The Family Fang" and I would undoubtedly recommend others to watch it.

Abstract

The Family Fang is a certainly strange and intriguing film and not lacking in complexity and interest that reflects on the relationship between art and reality and the deep traces that the artistic narcissism of a father leaves on his children.

Review

During their childhood and adolescence, the Fang brothers participated in "interventions" or performances in public places devised and filmed by their parents. As adults, Annie and Baxter (Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman), she an actress with an uncertain career and he, a blocked writer, meet them again and must face an unprecedented situation.

The Family Fang is a certainly strange and intriguing film and not lacking in complexity and interest. Two brothers marked by artistic narcissism and the manipulations of their father Caleb (a fearsome and relaxed Christopher Walken), the concessions of a surrendering mother (Maryann Plunkett) and a precocious and unconscious celebrity.

I'm talking about complexity because the ensemble that the director Jason Bateman also makes of the story in the present, flashbacks of the interventions in the past, videos of those interventions and the inclusion of false reports is effective and at times they bring the film closer to mockumentary and reality.

And I speak of interest because the film's explicit and implicit reflections on the relationships between art and reality are understandable, even if they are permeated by Caleb's debatable subjectivity.

Although the development of the story and some decisions or behaviors of the characters may seem forced or implausible, I believe that they must in part be understood based on the deep marks of family history and their artistic creed on the perception of reality and interaction with she.

Finally, it is worth highlighting the performances of the infallible Kidman, Bateman, Plunkett and the great Christopher Walken.

Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman grew up as the children of Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett, a pair of performance artists who incorporated them, as children, in their disruptive pieces as "Child A" and "Child B". When they grew up, they moved onto more normal forms of art, Miss Kidman as an actress and Bateman a novelist. Now they're visiting their parents, who want to incorporate them in their latest piece, but they refuse, and when their latest effort fails, Walken reacts badly.the parents go on a vacation, but disappear on a stretch of road where a serial killer operates; Miss Kidman thinks this is another piece of art, but Bateman contemplates the possibility they are dead.

It's a joyless contemplation on the meaning of art carried on the abilities of its leads. Walken dominates through sarcasm and anger, belittling Kidman's roles; Miss Plunkett hides her paintings from him; Miss Kidman struggles with addictions and a fading career; Bateman may have injured himself -- he begins the movie in the hospital and wears bandages throughout most of the movie. He also roughs out a story in which he and his sister are orphans and sent to a cruel orphanage. Clearly the obsessiveness of art has its human costs!

Sadness. Sadness so absolute it is punishing.

This is the best way I can describe what watching the inexorably depressing drama "The Family Fang" feels like virtually from start to finish. Jason Bateman is quite good in his role as we have become accustomed to seeing from the gifted actor. Bateman also doubles as Director here, and he certainly shows some intriguing promise for the future behind the camera. This is also in my opinion one of the best performances I have ever seen Nicole Kidman deliver. And I've seen her perform a lot.

Regrettably, none of this outstanding work can rescue "The Family Fang" from the chokehold of despondency which this wretched story relentlessly strangles us with. Ultimately what we are saddled with is a misery-drenched tale of two parents (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett) who regard their young children as little more than compliant pawns in a twisted game of self-aggrandizement and perverse gratification. And all in the name of obliterating the boundaries of "performance art".

It is child abuse that these two sinister souls inflict upon their own flesh and blood. Nothing else. It is abjectly despicable.

And it is so VERY sad.

After 'Bad Words', Bateman the director appears to be heading in the right direction and takes on a more ambitious, layered project. This film deals not only with a dysfunctional family, a concept that has fascinated American cinema ever since American Beauty, but also with the relation between art and life. Thematically, the family ensemble has been portrayed more incisively in the recent past (The Squid and the Whale, to name just one example with a similar character ratio), but the manner in which relationships are blurred and redefined here gives Fang a captivating spin.

We are presented with two seemingly wayward, middle-aged siblings who, it turns out, grew up in a tradition of 'intempestive art'. Alongside their eccentric parents, they enacted hoaxes of different scales in front of onlookers who were not in on the game - all with the aim of eliciting life out of the an otherwise mundane, controlled existence. As an accident reunites the family, which had drifted apart in the mean time, tensions persist, culminating when the parents disappear and the obvious question is asked: is this just another hoax?

The story works primarily because Kidman (Annie) and Bateman (Baxter), child A and child B, as their parents called them, convey an understanding that does not require explanations. It's the kind of sibling relationship that draws from so many shared experiences, joys and traumas that it defines a common frame of existence which time has difficulty in erasing. Similarly, we as an audience draw the faith required to suspend our disbelief from the energy the two control when on screen together. The questions pertaining to the philosophy of art, its authenticity and veracity, are interesting to ponder, but they only provide the backdrop to what Annie and Baxter have going on. The point of convergence between the two themes is that of control - its purpose in art, its purpose in relationship building.

This is fascinating, as control is so inherent to anything that happens in the early years within a family: the setting of constraints to the socially unrestrained spirit of childhood. It does not have to be coercive, but it is a matter of natural imprinting that occurs along the way, whether overtly or not. As adults, the struggle becomes to establish what we can (and should) control and what we need to let run freely. The mantra their father had instilled in Annie and Baxter emphasized the idea that by staying centered, one can let the surrounding chaos sweep over and past you. A lot of the time it's easier said than done. We also see that different people need different things in order to express themselves - a given, sure, but finely synthesized in Annie's qualms as an actor and Baxter's writer's block.

Where the story does fall a bit short is in the resolution. In a way, it's predictable and boring, but it's also inevitable. Inevitability is usually a good thing to have in an ending, especially in one dealing with the nature of art. Still, a stronger build up and a more resolute finale would have turned Family Fang into a really memorable piece of work. As it stands, it overemphasizes the idea that unrestrained (performance) art comes at a hidden cost both to those involved and to those affected by it. That it becomes hard to keep art and life contained. And, surely, that the price for this is too high.

Nonetheless, my newly found penchant for movies about siblings really let me enjoy this story. Perhaps just a bit more than I should have, but that's thanks to how authentic Annie and Baxter feel and the depth they lend to the experience.

The film held my interest and had some funny moments. However it seemed to drag on and end abruptly. I never quite understood how the parents made any money from their art. They seemed more like candid camera. The dad was clearly a narcissist and the mother was a victim of the dad as well. It was ok . but not a film I would watch again.

To all those "artistes" out there I will surely offend but to the common man who watches movies for some, just some redeeming value this is not a movie for you. Weak plot line, poor humor (certainly not a comedy as billed), the type of movie the pretentious "critics" will submit as Oscar material, when nothing could be further from the truth. A movie should entertain in some way shape or form. That "entertainment" can be measured by it's ability to move you emotionally in some way; cry, laugh, fear, anger, anxiety (suspense), etc. etc. If a movie can't move you emotionally in any direction to me it is not entertaining. This movie barely moves you to think. This movie fails in ALL categories. "Art" ... my foot!

the basic virtue - it is an ambitious, interesting and original film by Jason Bateman.and, for him, it is a real good point. in same measure, it is an inspired analysis of parenthood. not the last, the good performances( especially the reasonable younger Caleb of Jason Butler Harner).

the sin - fragile balance for define the art as pretext for control of life of family.the roles are straitjackets. the thin line between comedy and drama.the sketches of immaturity, credible but not convincing.

short, a good film. especially for reflect. about family, its foundation , its values and the parenthood as significant part defining it.

This is a movie that represents all parental and child relationships. Although, in this one the father's need to express an on art form with his wife & kids participating in a real life stunt. All children are affected by their parents dreams. I don't think I would've enjoyed the movie at all had it not been but for the great acting. Jason Bateman directed this one. I think he did a good job there as well.

This might be Jason bateman's best performance. Coming to grips with what our parents want us to be and who we are are two different things. In this movie the parents unnaturally usurp children to be immersed in the parents' fantastical games. The beauty of a sibling relationship is on display by Kidman and Bateman. Walken does an equally impressive job being committed to the role. Walken does a great job consistently seeing others as his players - not as much "going to baseball games " as being the umpire and manager. You will understand my last reference after seeing the movie (it won't spoil it for you).

I still remember the Jason Bateman's feature film debute as a director a couple of years ago. He really did good and now this is his second. It was adapted from the book of the same name that tells the story of a brother and sister who begin to investigate their mysteriously disappeared parents. With some flashbacks, which reveals how these two grew up with their famous prank artist parents.

When I saw the opening scene, I was really excited and thought the film would be like this throughout. And then obviously it changed its course towards the mystery surrounding parts that set in the present time. But I did not feel those developments were bad, except the final act, especially the ending surely a let down. Actually, it was not bad, only expected a better one.

The story certainly created the atmosphere where the viewers begin their predictions. That's the issue, because it failed to deliver par with the audience anticipation. Like maybe some smart twist or the edgy scenes before concluding would have done good.

Jason Bateman and Nicole Kidman with their multiple roles like actors, producers et cetera should have been the hefty load, but I think they managed well. Though the film was okay type, had its moments that did not last very long. I don't know what the novel fans say about the film, but I think I dissatisfied with the source material. Overall once watchable film, especially without any extraordinary expectations, because it is a simple drama with some amount of comedy and suspense.

6/10

What a great film and how original! It is funny and sad at the same time. It looks at art and forces you to ask some serious questions. At the center of the film is family and what family is about and how your life can be determined by your childhood even if it doesn't have to be. Great performances from everyone, especially Christoper Walken who never fails to steal every scene he's in. But, and this is a big but, the entire plot turns on a coincidence that is so contrived it sticks out and screams. I won't spoil your fun and say any more, but this is the only downside in an otherwise marvelous film, but it is a major flaw.

I liked all of the performances. How can you not? The actors are awarded household names. That said, the story is full on bad taste, beginning to end. I was not aware there was a book. I read a review saying the book is better and did not translate well onto the screen. Well, I can see that. If one would tell me the whole story of this movie one day, and if they were a good story teller, there is a chance I would find it a little amusing. To make matters worse, the movie starts a plot that grows into a crescendo that just does not pay off at the end. Without spoiling, I will say, I felt personally depressed by how poorly constructed and little grasp of reality the story takes a turn into so it can get finalized. To say something positive, the music is fun. The catchy song the kids perform saying that they should kill their parents is hilarious.

Opening titles. Jason Bateman stands in a farm field, looking wary and bemused. He cringes, as he is shot in the face, in slow motion, by a potato gun. Now - raise your hand if you'd expect this to be accompanied by a freeze-frame, dinging sound effect, and dry Ron Howard narration quipping "Baxter Fang was having a bad day."* Yeah; me too. Sadly, The Family Fang, Bateman (doubling as director)'s adaptation of Kevin Wilson's ode to the emotional alienation of a dysfunctional family unable to extricate life from pretentious, avant garde performance art, has nothing so unconventional on its mind. Instead, it's an unrelentingly somber affair, lacking the playfulness and dark comedy of Wilson's novel, in favour of a wholly dour take on the destructiveness of art.

Sure, any story of a family imploding is inherently melancholic, but eradicated are the sardonic moments of deadpan wry humour amidst calamity that Bateman, of all people, should consider second nature after his tenure with the Family Bluth. Instead, the entirety of The Family Fang is tinged with a greyish, 'rainy day' filter and accompanied by an austere tinkling piano, as if playing up their farcical performance art misadventures as high tragedy. Unfortunately, this austerity backfires, and, where the riffs of levity should help accentuate the emotional weight of the story, the incessant heaviness instead makes it all seem… well, a bit funny.

This isn't to say The Family Fang is an overall poor film – it's capably written and shot, well-paced, including a couple of well-orchestrated twists along the way as the film flirts with the murder mystery genre in its second act, and a good bit with a crossbow. The Fangs' artistic incursions/chaotic guerilla public disturbances are fun, albeit a touch toothless (get it). Similarly, Bateman allows scenes to play with a relaxed naturalism that helps the cast sell some of their more constructed dialogue. It's just all so utterly joyless that even sequences with the sort of exquisitely cringeworthy setups that should play as uncomfortable comedy gold are simply a slog to trudge through. Even intercut sequences of pretentiously superfluous art critic banter critiquing the integrity of the Fang's work simply play as sullen rather than playfully scathing. And it's pretty clear that when Walken's Caleb Fang relentlessly pontificates on 'great art should make you feel things,' glum and restless was not what he had in mind.

As the two children desperately trying to siphon through their baggage to carve out their own artistic careers (and functional lives) amidst their parents' warped shadows, Nicole Kidman and Bateman himself do give strong performances, Kidman's peppery indignation making a good foil against Bateman's timidly sarcastic resignation. Similarly, no one could be perfectly cast as the kooky but emotionally abusive Caleb Fang than Christopher Walken, but he's used so sparingly, and plays so caustically bitter the whole time, that his weirdness is too acidic to enjoy. Maryann Plunkett does bring a credible goofiness and impressively nuanced subtle sadness to his eccentric wife. Still, it's a shame, given the comedic potential of all involved, that Bateman sets the dial so firmly to melodrama, as, try as they might, the cast can't help but feel fairly wasted.

There's a certain twisted irony in such a drably conventional take on pretentious artistic posturing that it's tempting to give Bateman the benefit of the doubt of pulling audiences' legs with a meta-critique. Still, even the most generously reflexive audiences will likely be too bummed out by the time the credits roll to properly navigate the onion skins of irony to care. It's a shame, as The Family Fang, on paper, has every facet of a worthwhile film in place - a valid lampooning of the boundaries, subjectivity, and value of art, as well as a sterling cast selling a more familiar retreading of how gosh-darn broken families can get. Still, it's inescapable: the film, beyond its capable moments, is obvious, emotionally forced, and resoundingly refuses to play with the boundaries of its art form. In short: it's everything the Fangs would despise. And this time, they may be on to something.

-6.5/10

*Oh COME on - clearly Bateman had Arrested Development on the brain enough to rebrand his character from the novel's Buster. Just sayin'.

This is a very good work of fiction, well represented on the screen by Jason Bateman (who starred and directed it) and his stellar cast.

It's the story of a unusual family: you will find the story truly original, not only in its premises or in the sequence of events but also because in the end you'll be left without any moral teaching: everything will seem possible and acceptable.

I found it interesting but, to be sincere, not really catching or entertaining. If you are looking for a Comedy I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. If you think you are going to watch a drama you'll probably find it poorly moving. If you want to see something original, on the contrary, you could be satisfied I guess.

The Fangs are a family of artists and their lives are filled with drama, mysteries, and a web of lies.

Daughter, Annie (Nicole Kidman), son, Baxter (Jason Bateman), and their parents, performing artists Caleb (Christopher Walken) and Camille (Kathryn Hahn) all return to the family home after Baxter has an accident that lands him in the hospital. Shortly after they return home, Caleb and Camille decide to go away for a few days, but the police find their abandoned car at a rest stop.

Annie is an actress hoping to see her family reunited again as it was when she was young when they were all performers. She sees their disappearance is just another one of their acts. Baxter is a cynical writer and believes they're gone for good. Is this another one of their bizarre performance acts or has something really happened to them?

Baxter (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Nicole Kidman) Fang are siblings of a very special family who made fame for themselves in the kids' youth as for their public performances of vanguard art which consisted in a rupture of social and everyday standards. The whole family comes back together and Annie and Baxter and to confront their parents and their unusual past to figure out their now unbalanced life.

I am a deep lover of cinema, every time I go to the theater I genuinely go there, no matter what the movie, to appreciate cinema and even when watching bad films I always try to get something out of it. Unfortunately and most sadly, every now and then a film comes along where I just find myself lost for much to say. Being a big Jason Bateman fan myself it really pains me to say that I really hated this film and despite the fact that I saw Bateman making the film he wanted I just could not bear to stay with this film.

Contrary to one of the film I most hated in recent times like "Serena" (2014), I cannot say this film ever really got me annoyed or unnerved for its content. It is not one of those films where it happens that you get talked down which for me are the worst kind of experiences that get me angry and offended. "The Family Fang" is simply a deeply disorienting film from tone to script to editing to, even if I don't like to talk about elements that are not part of the film, its poster.

What basically makes this film unsettlingly weird from the start and on which the rest it builds on is the basic premise. The idea of these performances by the family. I had no fuc*ing idea what the hell was going on. The film repeatedly reflects this sentiment the audience will probably feel with extras in it, but this doesn't suddenly make it tangible and understandable, least of all it does give it the sense it desperately needs.

You are led to believe that offending two kids in public, making them kiss through a play despite the fact that they are siblings or assaulting a chicken sandwich stand should be these great polarizing pieces of vanguard-modern art. The film asks you to believe that there is a conflict there, that this has an effect on the world and on our characters, but since the dynamic is never nor convincing nor interesting it simply has no effect whatsoever on the film.

So then you are guided through a journey into a dysfunctional family where you feel absolutely lost and the film's style certainly doesn't help. The editing is disjointed and there are sequences played with classical music which I still have to figure out the reason for. The shots moreover are all over the place, a mishmash of Wes Anderson's geometrical style, with standard coverage and a spice of weird tracking shots which when added together just resulted in a truly chaotic experience for the mind in the first place, then when I just had given up on the film I kept being bewildered.

Moreover, the drama, certainly because of all of the above lackluster elements, but mostly because of a murky script, is truly boring. The conflict doesn't exist, you don't't understand what this characters' problems are, the focus is never pulled on something and it comes out as this generic family drama that has absolutely no emotional investment. The plot turns are the only thing that apparently come close to feeling exciting, then what is truly under them is unveiled and I frowned deeper into my seat for that.

"The Family Fang" is a film that really got on the wrong side of me. As a film lover I had almost nothing to take away from it and that really makes me sad because understand the effort that goes into filmmaking and whilst Bateman and his fellow filmmakers might be proud of what they have made and have every right in the world to be so, I personally found myself truly and unluckily wanting to escape the theater.

I didn't know anything about "The Family Fang" when I started watching it. At first the movie seemed confusing due to the nonlinear structure. But after about the first half-hour, you realize that you're watching a clever comedy-drama. Jason Bateman (also the director) and Nicole Kidman play siblings whose parents involved them in filmed pranks. Upon hearing that the parents have gone missing, they go to investigate, suspecting that it's another prank. But there's more than meets the eye.

It's not any sort of great movie, but still a clever one. Definitely has some neat surprises in store. I've heard about parents in real life who deliberately feature their children in YouTube videos (even doing things like breaking eggs on their heads!). The movie could probably be a double-bill with "The Royal Tenenbaums" for movies about dysfunctional families. Fine support from Christopher Walken, Maryann Plunkett, Jason Butler Harner, Kathryn Hahn, Harris Yulin and Linda Emond.

I traditionally like jason bateman films. He sometimes picks the offbeat and quirky scripts. And quirky this is! Annie and baxter's parents had the whole family put on weird, sometimes violent short performances in public places as children. Like fake bank robberies, with actual guns. And (annoying) confrontational street art. Christopher walken is dad, who wants them to participate again, when they come home on visits, but the kids have grown up and moved on. Dad keeps getting very upset, and yelling at people in public. Was that part of his art, or is he just getting dementia? And when the parents go missing, same question... is that more of their performance art, or are they really missing. The basic story is good, but I have to admit, I almost turned it off about halfway through. But I stuck it out, and had my questions answered. It's mostly good... there's quite a bit of extra, artsy stuff around the edges, a little over the top, but it's mostly good, quality stuff. Nicole kidman and jason bateman are the leads, in addition to the producers. Directed by bateman himself!