Mark Reviews Movies: INSTANT FAMILY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 15, 2018

Good intentions can only get a movie so far. As good as the intentions of Instant Family may be, the movie itself is a muddle of incongruous tones, mixed about with the aim of making the audience feel good about the purity of a couple who decide to adopt foster children, while feeling something akin to pity for the foster kids whom the couple take into their home.

The focus is primarily on the couple, who are in their late 30s and decide on a whim that they might want to have kids. The husband jokes that it would be great if they could adopt, say, a 5-year-old, just so the husband won't be one of those "old dads" (In flashback, he recalls a childhood friend's father, who has a heart attack and then gets hit in the head with a football, and that should give one a strong impression of the kind of comedy in which the movie deals). With that in mind, the wife starts looking into the process of adopting a foster child, and the smiling faces and sad stories of those kids make both the husband and the wife quite teary-eyed.

It's clear that co-writer/director Sean Anders means well with this story, especially considering that it's inspired by his own experience of adopting three foster children with his wife. Early in the movie, Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) attend a meeting for prospective adoptive parents. The women in charge of the program offer depressing statistics about how more than half a million children are in foster care across the country, how few prospective parents there are in such programs, and how about half of these children will be homeless, addicted to drugs, or dead if they turn 18 and age out of the program. The end credits even suggest that people should go to a website if they're interested in learning about adoption.

Yes, the movie is out to raise awareness and maybe move a few hearts to real-world action. This is a good thing, and even though the movie itself doesn't work, one cannot fault Anders for his obvious passion about the subject.

At this point, though, one has to put these well-meaning intentions aside, in order to address what the movie presents. In theory, we would hope that the movie's intentions would carry through in more ways than its premise, it occasional recitation of statistics, and its dedication to telling a feel-good story above all else.

For that last part, Anders and co-screenwriter John Morris take a primarily comic approach to this material, emphasizing the mounting frustration of the kids' prospective parents, while offering a few jokey supporting characters and more slapstick humor than seems necessary. The butt of a good number of those physical gags is one of the kids—a boy who's traumatized by abuse and also accident-prone.

The movie mostly cares about that second part, and that's a significant problem here. In telling this story from the parents' perspective and approaching it chiefly for laughs (until it becomes quite sappy in the third act, of course), the movie ignores the kids and their issues, except within the context of highlighting the frustration and deepening bond of the parents.

The kids are three siblings: eldest Lizzy (Isablea Moner), middle Juan (Gustavo Quiroz), and youngest Lita (Julianna Gamiz). At an adoption fair, Pete and Ellie are impressed by the 15-year-old Lizzy's personality. When the two say they're willing to consider adopting her, Karen (Octavia Spencer) and Sharon (Tig Notaro), the heads of the adoption program, tell the couple that Lizzy's younger siblings have to stay with her. Pete and Ellie agree, and the three move in with the couple for a review period.

Lizzy isn't sold on the two, but her younger siblings are. The younger kids exist here to tug on the parents' heartstrings, while completely waving away Juan's obvious distress about abandonment. Meanwhile, Lizzy shows herself to be an excellent manipulator of Pete, Ellie, and their extended family members, turning the couple's good intentions against them in an effort to hold out until the children's birth mother gets out of prison.

That's a far more intriguing story than Pete and Ellie's, and Lizzy is a much more interesting character than the prospective parents, too. It's strange that Anders and Morris are so conscious of the underlying psychology of the kids but only use it to generate conflict for the parents (or, in a couple of uncomfortable scenes, to produce laughs at the expense of Juan's anxiety). Even stranger, Pete and Ellie are never convincing as parents (The movie waits for the kids to change, not the couple), and by the end, after they've been arrested for assault (There's a subplot involving a creepy janitor at Lizzy's school that's best left unexplained), one wonders how they're still being considered to adopt the kids.

Some of this really doesn't work, but there is a sweet core to the movie's central relationships. It kind of makes up for the contrivances, manipulations, and tonal inconsistencies in Instant Family, but we're left wondering what a more serious, more sincere, and more sympathetic approach to this material could have accomplished.

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