Review: Instant Family

Instant Family manages to be both a surprisingly insightful look at the pleasures and perils of adopting a bunch of kids old enough to already have their own personalities and exactly the sappy feel-good tear-jerking drama the trailers have been selling for months. How does it pull off this extremely difficult and to be honest somewhat impressive balancing act? Let's start with Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne.

They play Pete and Ellie Wagner, professional house flippers and enthusiastic home renovators, which should instantly make them the worst people in the world but because they're played by Wahlberg and Byrne they're actually kind of fun in a self-aware kind of way. Both have firmly established comic personas as "wacky parents" (Wahlberg from the Daddy's Home films, Byrne from the Bad Neighbours series), and that experience gives their performances just enough of a cartoony edge to make their uptight stressed out characters likable.

Deciding that they'd like to have kids and that adopting an older child would be a good way for them to avoid being the oldest parents at high school, they dive right into to world of adoption - cue montage of online photos of adorable kids saying things like "I need a mommy and daddy that will keep me safe" (no wonder Pete demands Ellie keep those photos away from him). Their guides in this world are a tag-team of guidance counselors played by Tig Notaro (the serious one) and Octavia Spencer (the sassy one), and they are in no mood to pull any punches.

Much like the casting of Wahlberg and Byrne, their appearance signals that this is a film that isn't afraid to get some laughs out of what seems like it should be a Very Serious Subject. And this is a film that's hyper-aware about pretty much every issue you could possibly think of around adoption. Are white parents adopting children of another race going to be seen as "white saviours"? Maybe - but it's a lot better than having "whites only" stamped on your file.

So it's the cast that's tasked with smoothing out the bumps in a film that on the one hand is really thoughtful about the problems and conflicts that come with adoption (director Sean Anders was working in part from his own experiences) and on the other has a bunch of Blind Side jokes about one parent looking to adopt a black child who's good at sports.

The Wagners eventually adopt a trio of kids, each with their own issues even before it turns out their birth mother might still be in the picture (obviously this doesn't come to light until the Wagners have totally bonded with them). The constant whiplash between cheap but often effective jokes and corny but often effective emotional moments is somehow both erratic film-making and a decent attempt to capture the roller-coaster ride of parenthood; this never quite figures out what tone it wants to take, but ends up making that conflict seem like the point of the whole exercise.

Usually this kind of thing would be filed under "crowd-pleasing", but the two extremes are so extreme - or at least, they feel that way compared to each other - that it's a little hard to figure out what this is aiming for. If you're into the sharp insights into race and privilege, then the heart-rending moments might feel exploitative; if you want a feel-good story about a family coming together and finding each other then some of the harsher jokes might rub you the wrong way.

But Byrne and Wahlberg make for great parents; Byrne especially gets a lot of milage out of the way just about everything in this film - including her character - snaps wildly from one extreme to the other. If Hollywood isn't going to give us another Bad Neighbors movie, this'll have to do.

- Anthony Morris