Sean Anders makes broad studio comedies built around stars the audience already likes, and once, in Instant Family, he put something he had lived through inside one. It is the film of his worth an evening, and the one that shows what his reflex for a gag costs him.
Fi1m perspective
Two people sit in the dark and whisper that they would like to give the children back. It is the most honest minute in Instant Family (2018), and Sean Anders, to his credit, lets it sit. Then, because this is a Sean Anders film, somebody falls over. That is the pattern of his work as we have seen it: a true thing, followed at once by an apology for it.
He came to it without training. He and John Morris made Never Been Thawed (2005) on their own money, and Morris has stayed his writing partner since, through Sex Drive (2008), scripts for Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) and We're the Millers (2013), and a run as director of Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) and Daddy's Home (2015) with its 2017 sequel. These are ensemble comedies with familiar faces in them, and Mark Wahlberg has been in three. Then came Instant Family, drawn from Anders's own experience of fostering and adopting three siblings, and the writing changed.
What changed is that he knew the material. The film's best stretch is a set of training classes in which Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro explain the foster system to a room of nervous couples: the honeymoon period, the child who tests you to see if you leave, the teenagers nobody picks. Notaro reads the statistics flat and Spencer plays a woman who has watched a hundred couples decide they are the exception. We laughed a great deal in that room, and at the whispered conversation in the dark we laughed and then felt slightly ashamed of ourselves, because the film had made us think the same thing before showing us two people ashamed of it too. Anders said he wanted to make a comedy that shows how this really works, and for long stretches he did.
The trouble is that he does not trust quiet, which is what you would expect from a man who spent a decade writing broad comedies for studios. A conversation about the children's birth mother is followed by a pratfall. Juan is injured more times than one film should permit. A subplot about Lizzy and a phone is played as farce when it should not have been. Each time the film gets somewhere true, a gag arrives to reassure us, and the reassurance is the weakest thing in it.
Since then he has made Spirited (2022), a Christmas musical, which we have not reviewed and will not judge here. On the evidence we have, Anders is a capable director of comedy who becomes a better one when he has lived through the subject. The films to hope for are the ones where he has, and where nobody falls over afterwards.
Biography
Sean Anders is an American film director and screenwriter. Born on 19 June 1969 in DeForest, Wisconsin, he began his career co-writing and directing the independent film Never Been Thawed (2005). He followed this with Sex Drive (2008), which he also wrote and directed.
Anders has written or co-written several comedies, including Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), She's Out of My League (2010), Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011), We're the Millers (2013) and Dumb and Dumber To (2014). He has directed That's My Boy (2012), Horrible Bosses 2 (2014), Daddy's Home (2015), its 2017 sequel, Instant Family (2018) and Spirited (2022). Instant Family, which he co-wrote with John Morris, draws partly on his own experiences. He is the brother of actress Andrea Anders.
