Instant Family
“Instant Family” is exactly the movie I expected to get going in. I’m sure it was the same way for my wife and her brother and sisters and sister-in-law I watched it with. For them, that likely added up to a more satisfying movie experience than it did for me; I enjoyed it just fine as it went about it’s predictable business.
The film has Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne starring as Pete and Ellie, a married couple who is having success as they buy houses, rebuild them, and flip them for profit. They are showing one such house to Byrne’s sister and her husband, and the subject of kids comes up, and it leads to a realization that maybe something is missing in their lives. They decide to see what would go into adopting foster kids, and after an 8-week course, they take in three siblings- teen Lizzie (Isabela Moner), insecure Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and hyper Lita (Julianna Gamiz)- but find they might be in for more than they expected with parenthood.
Every other film about parents trying to take care of children, regardless of how they come to have them, is invariably going to get stuck in the same formula and structure of Ron Howard’s brilliant, heartwarming “Parenthood.” That film has such a fantastic and simple way it goes about the subject that, at some point, any filmmaker trying to work in that particular story is going to find themselves lifting from it in some way. Director Sean Anders and his co-writer, John Morris, are very much aiming for that “Parenthood” vibe in this film, as Pete and Ellie struggle to find their footing in taking care of the three kids they have taken in. The film they have made is entertaining and just sentimental enough to have an impact, but even though it is inspired by a true story, it’s still a movie, and still adheres to conventional comedy-drama storytelling tropes about family, so one shouldn’t be shocked when it lands down-the-middle with how this type of film works.
As the parents, Wahlberg and Byrne are likeable enough, and they play the moments where we get a sense of Pete and Ellie’s selfish thinking about why they took in the kids, and why they want to keep them, pretty well. As the people in charge of the foster agency, Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro gets some good moments, both comedic and a little weightier, to play, but really, the kids are the stars of this movie. While Quiroz and Gamiz do good work in cluing us in into the personalities of Juan and Lita, and each have great “kid moments” in the film, the brightest star, and best performance, in the film belongs to Moner, who has (predictably) the meatiest role in the film, and holds her own with every actor she comes against in the film. Like everything else, her arc in the film is something we’re accustomed to in this type of film, but she makes it matter, and gets to the heart of the film in a way you expect from any talented kid actor. “Instant Family” is largely forgettable, but Moner, like her character in the film, makes an instant impression that lingers after the film has ended.
