Instant Family

Sean Anders and John Morris have spent most of their careers writing broad studio comedies, Daddy’s Home among them, and Instant Family opens as though it will be another. Pete and Ellie Wagner (Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne) flip houses for a living, get needled about having no children over dinner, and decide, half as a dare, to look into fostering. What follows is drawn from Anders’s own experience of adopting, and it shows. The film knows things about the foster system that a gag writer would not, and it is at its best when it simply tells us them. It is at its worst when it loses its nerve and reaches for a pratfall.

The training classes are the best-written stretch. Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro run them as Karen and Sharon, one warm and one dry, and between them they deliver the facts of the system to a room of nervous couples: the honeymoon period, the child who will test you to see if you leave, the teenagers nobody picks. Notaro reads every grim statistic in the same flat voice, and Spencer’s Karen has the patience of a woman who has watched a hundred couples decide they are the exception. We laughed a great deal in that room. The adoption fair that follows, with the teenagers at a table by themselves, is played for comedy and lands as something sadder, and Anders has the sense not to underline it.

Isabela Merced plays Lizzy, the teenager who has been raising her brother and sister, Juan (Gustavo Escobar) and Lita (Julianna Gamiz), for years and does not intend to stop because two strangers have a spare room. She gives the film its spine. She looks at the Wagners’ kitchen the way a tenant looks at a landlord, and she never lets us forget that she is a guest who could be moved on. Byrne is the better of the two leads, playing Ellie’s eagerness as though she has revised for it and is dismayed to find there is no exam. Wahlberg does his amiable regular guy, and he is likeable in it, and that is roughly the whole of what he does.

The scene we keep coming back to is a small one. After a night of Lita screaming for crisps, the Wagners sit in the dark and admit in whispers that they would like to give the children back. We laughed, then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the film had made us think the same thing and then showed us two people ashamed of it too. Anders lets the moment sit. It is the most honest minute in the film and it is over in about a minute.

Brett Pawlak shoots it bright and flat, kitchens full of warm light, nothing to look at and nothing to trip over; it could be television. Clayton Hartley’s one good idea is the Wagners’ own house, a job half finished with tarpaulin over the banisters, which is the film’s only visual joke about what these two think they are doing. Michael Andrews’s score arrives on acoustic guitar whenever somebody is about to be moved and tells us so a bar early. Brad Wilhite cuts the comedy briskly and the drama not at all: the film runs 118 minutes and there are at least three scenes that end, and then end again. Margo Martindale, as Pete’s mother Sandy, is given a great deal of shouting; Julie Hagerty, as Ellie’s mother Jan, is given less and does more with it.

The trouble is that Anders does not trust quiet. A conversation about the children’s birth mother is followed by somebody falling over. Juan is injured in slapstick fashion more times than one film should permit. A subplot about Lizzy and a phone is played as farce and should not have been. Each time the film gets somewhere true, it apologises with a gag, as though the audience had been promised one and might ask for its money back.

The second half arrives at a question about the children’s mother that we will not describe. The film handles it more honestly than we expected and resolves it more neatly than it deserves. Parenthood understood that families are never finished, and this one keeps hinting at the same thing before tidying up. It is a 12A that a family can sit through together, which is rarer than it should be, and a child watching will learn something true about other children. The adults will laugh at Tig Notaro and wish she had been allowed to run the whole thing.