Review: Will We Ever Let Our Rom-Com Idols Age?
On Netflix's ‘A Family Affair,’ the rom-com renaissance, and the invisible clock for the women of the genre
Thanks for reading Alienated Young Woman! Subscribe for free to receive bimonthly reading recommendations, monthly reviews, and more.
Pro-tip: This post may be cut off via email, so try reading on your browser or via the Substack app.
Julia Roberts was supposed to save the rom-com. Or perhaps the responsibility fell to another of the stars who carried the genre in its 90s and noughties-era peak—Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Lopez. This summer, Netflix hoped the savior might even be Nicole Kidman, distanced as she’s been from the rom-com historically.
Before Universal enlisted Roberts to revive the genre with Ticket to Paradise in 2022, fans and critics alike had spent years lamenting the death of the romantic comedy. The genre’s scarcity in theatres—replaced with existing IP1 and franchise hits while its limited output was relegated to underpromoted streaming releases—seemed, to many, an omen of its impending (or already existent) doom. And given Hollywood’s apparent penchant for nostalgia and proven successes over anything original, who better to save the rom-com than the stars who shaped it the first time around?
So Roberts—who dominated the rom-com throughout the 90s in films like My Best Friend’s Wedding and Notting Hill—made her grand return. Just a few months earlier, Sandra Bullock, Roberts’s fellow rom-com darling, had similarly returned with box office hit The Lost City. The same year, Jennifer Lopez pulled double duty with starring roles in Marry Me and Shotgun Wedding,2 banking even more directly on nostalgia by evoking her own nuptial-centric 2000s hits like The Wedding Planner and Monster-in-Law. Finally, former Nora Ephron muse Meg Ryan returned from a 14-year rom-com hiatus last winter with What Happens Later, which she also co-wrote and directed.3 Soon, each star naturally found herself at the center of discourse about her apparent attempt to “save the rom-com.”
Their rescue missions weren’t unsuccessful. Ticket to Paradise and The Lost City both achieved major success as theatrical releases, while Marry Me outperformed box office expectations and became an immediate streaming hit.4 The success has even begun extending to films with newer stars at the helm—Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s sleeper hit Anyone but You made back nearly 10 times its budget as a theatrical release last winter, becoming an international success. The genre has far from made it back to the dominance it held two or three decades ago, but perhaps there’s hope for it yet.
Enter Kidman with A Family Affair, which premiered last week on Netflix.
Kidman was never a “rom-com star” in the same sense as Ryan or Roberts, whose outputs were prolific during the genre’s peak.5 Though she’s worked consistently for the last 35 years, A Family Affair joins 2005’s Bewitched and 2011’s Just Go With It (in which Kidman plays a supporting role) as one of her notably few credits that fit the bill. Perhaps that’s part of what makes her foray into the genre now, in its era of slow revival, so enticing: she inhabits another echelon of movie stardom.
Despite its streaming-exclusive release, with Kidman at its helm, A Family Affair feels like a return not just to the rom-com, but to banking on movie stars. It is, after all, an original script (not adapted from existing IP), reliant on the star power of Kidman and co-star Zac Efron—once a teen movie heartthrob at the height of teen movie heartthrobs—to draw in audiences.
It helps that it’s a movie about movie stars. Written by newcomer Carrie Solomon and directed by veteran Richard LaGravenese (of The Bridges of Madison County and PS I Love You fame), A Family Affair follows Zara (Joey King), an overworked 24-year-old personal assistant in Hollywood whose boss, A-list action star Chris Cole (Zac Efron) falls for her widowed mother, author Brooke Harwood (Kidman).
If that sounds familiar, it’s because A Family Affair’s twin film, The Idea of You, premiered on Prime Video two months earlier. In the latter, Anne Hathaway (another former rom-com darling) stars as Solène, a 40-year-old single mother who falls for Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the 24-year-old frontman of her teen daughter’s favorite boyband.
But where The Idea of You leaned on the forbidden sexiness of a supposedly taboo age-gap romance, A Family Affair is far less concerned with its stars’ generational difference. Instead, the age gap is eclipsed by other, more significant conflicts, like the couple’s mutual concern for Zara and her disapproval of their relationship. (The Idea of You also veers scandalously young with its love interest, while A Family Affair opts for an action star in his mid-30s, for whom any age gap may feel comparatively less taboo.) Their age gap certainly isn’t ignored—Brooke is older than Chris, that much is certain—but A Family Affair’s decision to de-emphasize its supposed scandalousness is refreshing, particularly after its twin film.
Then, about half an hour into A Family Affair, one line of dialogue reveals what seems like a minor detail: Brooke is not 57, like Kidman herself, but 50.
With that, A Family Affair becomes something else. Alongside Ticket to Paradise and What Happens Later, the film seems to mark a conspicuous, growing pattern in the resurrected rom-com. Banking on a cocktail of star power and nostalgia, each film enlists a beloved long-time A-list actress, now well into her fifties (or in Ryan’s case, her sixties). Then, with little to no bearing on the film’s actual plot, a line placed in an early scene reveals her character to be years younger than the actress herself. Specifically, no older than 50.
The three films are hardly triplets in any other sense. Ticket to Paradise was a box office sensation backed by Universal, a major distributor. What Happens Later was a micro-budget indie distributed by Bleecker Street. A Family Affair is a streaming exclusive that, unlike Roberts and Ryan’s films, didn’t see its star step into the role of producer or director. Still, they seem bound by this same strange constraint.
In Ticket to Paradise, which Roberts also produced, she stars as Georgia, a divorced woman who reunites with her ex-husband (George Clooney) to stop their 22-year-old daughter, Lily (Kaitlyn Dever), from impulsively marrying a man she’s met on vacation in Bali. So naturally—though it’s largely unimportant to the story and though Roberts and Clooney were 54 and 61 when the film premiered—the film’s opening scene establishes Lily was born to parents in their early twenties, placing Roberts and Clooney’s characters somewhere around age 45.
The same is true for Ryan in What Happens Later—perhaps an even more notable decision, considering she also co-wrote and directed it. Ryan, who was 61 when the film premiered, stars as Willa, a free-spirited middle-aged woman who finds herself snowed in at the airport on Leap Day when she bumps into her ex, Bill (David Duchovny, then 63). During the pair’s first on-screen interaction, we’re quickly told this encounter comes 25 years after their initial breakup. A breakup that, for all intents and purposes, appears to have taken place when the characters were similarly in their early to mid-twenties, placing the characters right around 50. The age ceiling strikes again.
This pattern of aging down the rom-com star falls most noticeably—or just most needlessly—on the shoulders of Kidman. Where Ticket to Paradise and What Happens Later at least attempted to provide marginal justification for aging down their stars—a (lazy) route to framing the central lovers’ past breakups as those of reckless, impulsive young people—A Family Affair doesn’t even go that far.
It’s not hyperbolic to say that absolutely nothing in A Family Affair necessitates aging down Kidman’s Brooke. There’s no reason she must have become a mother at 26, rather than 33, and no significance placed on her reaching such a milestone age.6 There’s no real importance to the exact width of her age gap with Chris Cole (though both this film and The Idea of You pinpoint the gap at exactly 16 years, as if to say they’ve found the edge of palatability).7 Unlike in The Idea of You, there’s no real exploration of celebrity, no peek into the public discourse surrounding Brooke and Chris’s age-gap romance. The only reaction to their relationship that matters comes from Zara, whose concerns are hardly age-gap related, making Brooke’s exact age all the more irrelevant.
And unlike with Roberts and Ryan, the change to Kidman’s age isn’t applied equally to her male counterpart—Efron’s character, like the actor himself, is established to be in his mid-30s.8 Here, the manipulation of age is definitively female.
It’s not that the distance between Kidman and her character is insurmountable. At seven years, it’s actually the smallest age gap between character and actor of the three films mentioned.9 Kidman is just as believable as 50 as she would be playing 57. And of course (particularly because Kidman, unlike Ryan and Roberts, did not have a leadership role in the film’s production), it’s plenty possible the throwaway line determining Brooke’s age predates her casting altogether. Plenty possible the film was always seeking a 50-year-old actress, irrelevant as her exact age is to the plot, and found a suitable candidate in Kidman simply because the actor does make a convincing 50.
(Of course, accepting this justification might lead us to an endless loop of questions and excuses about all three films: if they depended so entirely on their stars, why could the scripts not avoid aging them down?)
But the real issue is that placed in this context, the change to Kidman’s age can’t be unseen. It hangs over the movie’s remaining 90 minutes, a looming question about what was so unimaginable about the same romance happening to a 57-year-old woman. In doing so, it raises questions about why any of the three films is so determined to avoid its star’s real age. Does some outdated aversion to the idea of an older mother push the films to make her a younger one? Does her adjacency to menopause make it so unpalatable to pair her with a younger, virile partner? (Perhaps, as each film preemptively addresses this by establishing that its lead has already had children, as if a single menopausal woman who had not done so would be too tragic for the screen). Is it just some visceral fear of her aging body?
Perhaps most distressingly, it evokes the possibility of a genuine belief that a woman Kidman’s age has ceased to exist as a sexual being—or at least a belief that audiences would prefer not to see her as such, women viewers her age be damned. The change lingers, as if to say, don’t worry! It was all just a trick. We only wanted our star to draw you in—we would never make you watch an old lady.
So the rom-com adores its leading lady—the same leading lady we’ve adored for the last 35 years—and hopes we too will adore her, but not enough to adore her in her entirety. On streaming and theatrical release alike, the revived mid-budget romantic comedy of the 2020s banks on her longevity while remaining terrified to admit that longevity is made possible by age. It prompts us to hail her as “saving the rom-com,” and in the same breath relegates her to roles written for a younger woman, bent on insisting she is one.
It hasn’t always been like this. Yes, ageism has always existed, especially for women, and Hollywood has always been its fiercest defender. That much goes without saying. Even in her breakout role 35 years ago, as 32-year-old Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally, Ryan was already playing a character terrified of getting older. But the romantic comedy—even the mainstream, box office hit romantic comedy—has not always been so afraid of the over-50 woman.
It’s been a mere two decades since the ascent of director Nancy Meyers, whose middle-aged rom-coms were definitive for the genre in the 2000s. In 2003, Meyers had a hit on her hands with Something’s Gotta Give, in which Diane Keaton (then 57) starred as Erica Barry, a successful, divorced 56-year-old playwright who unexpectedly falls for her adult daughter’s womanizing 63-year-old ex (Jack Nicholson, then 66). Meyers had a second middle-aged success in 2009 with It’s Complicated, led by a 60-year-old Meryl Streep as a divorced pastry chef who simultaneously begins a new relationship with her architect and an illicit affair with her remarried ex-husband.10 The films raked in multiple Golden Globe nominations (and an Oscar nomination for Keaton), critical acclaim for their leads, and over $220 million each at the box office.
Also in both films, Keaton and Streep’s respective characters date casually and frequently, having plenty of on-screen sex as they go. All the while, their ages are anything but hidden from the audience—they’re central to the characters. They are sexy, sexual beings because they’ve had the time to grow into them.
Not so for the 55+ leading lady of today. At some point between Streep and Keaton (literally) baring all for the screwball rom-com of the noughts and Ticket to Paradise insisting its leads are not quite 45, the romantic comedy became terrified of the aging woman. Perhaps it’s the genre’s own form of warped nostalgia: for all that we lament the dying rom-com and depend on its (female) icons to resuscitate it, their eligibility as saviors seems to rely on their ability to shield audiences from the truth, to pretend it has not been quite so long since their last appearance. Ticket to Paradise and What Happens Later praise the long-awaited return of Roberts and Ryan, but politely request they pretend not to have aged so much in their time away. So A Family Affair steps onto a landmine of ageism in a genre already ravaged by its own shortcomings, and with one line of dialogue, sets it off again.
There’s a sort of whiplash to the overall gender politics of A Family Affair. On one hand, it counters The Idea of You with a more nuanced and better-executed exploration of the mother-daughter relationship at its core. Zara reacts angrily and impulsively to the discovery of Brooke and Chris’s affair for reasons she can’t always articulate, and her eventual acceptance of their relationship comes with the realization that she’s placed unfair expectations on her mother because she’s struggled to see her as anything else.
This might be the film’s most interesting thread: as much as it’s an exemplary, almost formulaic rom-com about a steamy affair, A Family Affair is also a film about a woman reckoning with the identity loss that comes with motherhood, something we rarely see discussed so openly. In a turn that almost echoes Meyers, A Family Affair drives home that before Brooke was a mother, she was a woman with dreams and desires of her own, and that she deserves to be that woman still. Brooke’s motherhood, despite her daughter’s initial protestations, can no longer come before her personhood.
On the other hand, A Family Affair still falls into the same trap that kneecapped The Idea of You two months earlier: as Brooke, Kidman can be middle-aged and sexy, but not middle-aged and sexual. Where both films’ male love interests begin the film as single adults with histories of dating freely (and occasionally enjoying casual sex along the way), the women in turn can enter the relationship only after years of faithful chastity.
For Hathaway’s Solène, her separation from an unfaithful husband, her devotion to motherhood, and her successful career as a gallerist have taken her out of any sort of sexual contention for the last three years of singledom. For Kidman’s Brooke, it’s the death of her beloved husband, a successful writing career, and the same devotion to single-parenting that have similarly placed dating on the back burner for the past 11. Alongside motherhood, Brooke and Solène can be sexy, single, successful career women, but a sexy, single, successful career woman who actually has sex would evidently be a bridge too far.
But unlike The Idea of You, even after the central romance begins, A Family Affair remains devastatingly unsexy. Though in fairness, Kidman and Efron do technically have the beginnings of a (brief, mostly-clothed) sex scene, in a larger sense, the movie radiates with chastity. Where Hathaway’s 40-year-old Solène enjoyed frequent sex scenes (and superior chemistry) with Galitzine’s Hayes Campbell, the bulk of 50-year-old Brooke’s supposedly steamy affair with Chris is strikingly non-physical, and almost entirely devoid of sensuality.
Roberts’s character meets a similar fate in Ticket to Paradise. Though she’s given not one, but two love interests (alongside Clooney, there’s Lucas Bravo as Georgia’s younger fiance, Tom), and though both men’s physical appeal is frequently noted, the idea of Georgia actually having sex with either man at any point in the film feels alien to its remarkably chaste script. She never makes it past a brief kiss.
The chastity is particularly noticeable in A Family Affair in part because, throughout her career, Kidman herself has remained unafraid of a sensual role. From earlier films like Eyes Wide Shut to more recent projects like Big Little Lies, she’s been no stranger to palpable physical chemistry and explicit sex scenes. And the shift here is not merely in genre—Roberts and Ryan have been similarly open to more overtly sexual characters, at least in their earlier years of rom-com stardom. But somehow, in all three films, sex is largely a suggestion, physical chemistry barely a consideration. Where Meyers’s films of the 2000s seemed to embrace an inherent sexiness in aging, in A Family Affair, the aging sexual body exists mostly in theory.
It’s worth noting that not only were things previously different for the rom-com star, but they remain different outside of the rom-com bubble. In the last decade, both Kidman and Roberts have pivoted to the world of the prestige miniseries, starring in projects for which they’ve also served as executive producers. In this world, Kidman has spent most of her 50s producing and starring in projects like Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, which center on women who are undeniably sexual beings without lingering questions about the actor’s age.11 Though Roberts’s two miniseries projects—Amazon’s Homecoming and Starz’s Gaslit—admittedly feature less romance than Kidman’s, they are similarly unconcerned with hiding or justifying Roberts’s age. Lest we blame the rom-com age-fudging on its stars’ own vanity, in the world of the prestige miniseries, Kidman and Roberts seem to have built a haven for their craft, one where they’re free to be middle-aged actresses in peace.
In fact, the world of prestige TV in general seems to largely circumvent the rom-com’s issue with middle age. Closer to the romantic comedy genre than Kidman and Roberts’s projects, there’s And Just Like That… Sex and the City’s much-discussed 2020s reboot, which generally steers clear of this problem of sexlessness. Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte—three of the original series’ protagonists—are now in their mid-fifties, joined by a slew of new friends in various stages of middle age, and for the most part, they’re just as sexual as ever.12 Their circumstances aren’t even particularly far from Brooke’s in A Family Affair or Soléne’s in The Idea of You: Miranda is a divorced parent to a teenager, Carrie is a widowed successful author, Charlotte York Goldenblatt is a devoted full-time mom. But no one is relegated to chastity by age or circumstance—Miranda, Carrie, and numerous single friends date and have sex freely, while marriage and motherhood does not at all prevent Charlotte’s sex life from being as interesting (or as frequent) as those of her single friends. They were, are, and always will be sexual creatures.
In that way, the characters of And Just Like That… feel like an even more liberated response to Meyers’s women, not just dating freely, but readily, openly, and graphically exploring their sexualities—the inherent sexiness of having aged. They enjoy explicit sex scenes, casual and serious hookups, and a general commitment to pleasure that feels foreign to their cinematic counterparts, taking a sledgehammer to the cultural fear of an aging woman’s sexuality in the process. For all intents and purposes, the approach seems to be working—after two near-immediate renewals, And Just Like That… will soon enter its third season. The series that was never afraid of its aging women progresses ever forward. Must the world for the middle-aged movie star decay around it?
Part of what makes the age-related hangup in A Family Affair so difficult to overcome is that more so than Ticket to Paradise or What Happens Later, the film does try to be better than its ageist constraints. It attempts a genuine exploration of how Brooke has been consistently overlooked by everyone around her, her identity as a middle-aged mother allowing her to be written off. It wants to reclaim her sexuality. Arguably, that’s what all three rom-coms want for their stars: to reclaim their identities as romantic leads. But they want to reclaim that identity for younger women than the ones they have.
I’m reminded of my experience watching Aquaman six years ago, in which a 51-year-old Kidman cameos as the mother of brothers played by Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson, then 38 and 44. The jolt of seeing her appear in that role without so much as age makeup, even in a high fantasy setting, as if her regular appearance was enough to make the role believable. Seeing it happen again four years later with The Northman.13 The idea that somehow, by turning 50, she’d brought this on herself, crossed some invisible border into non-viability as anything but a hero’s mother. The realization that though her options in the TV world remained plentiful, her avenues for retaining movie stardom were winnowing down, would eventually rely on either an early elderliness or an insistence she has not gotten older at all. How high the crime of becoming a middle-aged woman, how readily we punish the movie star we once adored.
A Family Affair never quite decides what position it wants to take on this phenomenon. The film may want Nicole Kidman to helm its steamy romance—to save the rom-com—but it doesn’t want this Nicole Kidman.
This is ultimately why the film falls short, as did What Happens Later and Ticket to Paradise before it: they are terrified of their stars. What starts as a throwaway line grows bigger and bigger until it becomes something unignorable, looming over the entire story. It’s the reason Brooke’s romance is grounded in past chastity, and perhaps why all three rom-coms are so generally sexless. It has little to do with Kidman, Roberts, or even Ryan, and everything to do with the resurrected romantic comedy and what it wants to say about romance, sex, and age at large: that a decade after Meyers laid down her mantle, it’s been replaced with a ticking clock. That as much as it banks on its star’s longevity, to properly evoke nostalgia, she must remain frozen in time. That whatever may await her in the world of TV, for the female rom-com lead, the clock—for romantic viability, for worth, perhaps for the title of “movie star” in general—still stops at 50.
Thanks for reading Alienated Young Woman! If you’ve enjoyed this post, consider sharing it on your socials. Subscribe for free to receive monthly long-form reviews, biweekly reading guides, and bonus content.
All images via the author
Intellectual property.
While Marry Me had a theatrical release, Shotgun Wedding premiered exclusively on Prime Video after its theatrical release was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the numbers:
Ticket to Paradise was Roberts’s first appearance in a rom-com since Mother’s Day in 2016, and her first time as one of a rom-com’s leading lovers since 2011’s Larry Crowne. She’s appeared in a total of 15 rom-coms throughout her career, beginning with 1989’s Mystic Pizza.
The Lost City was Bullock’s first rom-com since The Proposal in 2009. She’s starred in seven total rom-coms, beginning with Love Potion No. 9 in 1992.
Marry Me was Lopez’s first rom-com since her role in the 2012 ensemble comedy What to Expect When You’re Expecting (though she’d previously come close to a return in 2018 with the rom-com-adjacent Second Act). She’s starred in a total of nine rom-coms, beginning with The Wedding Planner in 2001.
What Happens Later was Ryan’s first rom-com since 2009’s Serious Moonlight. She’s starred in a total of 11 rom-coms, beginning with When Harry Met Sally in 1989.
What Happens Later was notably less successful at the box office, but also entered under different circumstances: as a micro-budget independent film distributed by Bleecker Street, rather than a major distributor like Universal, which handled Ticket to Paradise and Marry Me, or Paramount, which handled The Lost City.
The nature of Lopez’s star is harder to pin down (and probably merits its own essay), but I’d argue she did have a definitive rom-com era, starring in seven between 2001 and 2012. As actors, Bullock and Roberts are closer to Kidman, having moved into prestige drama as their careers progressed, but each has had a significant presence in the rom-com genre throughout.
And much like Roberts, two of Kidman’s four real-life children are significantly younger than her character’s 24-year-old daughter.
These gaps hardly mimic real life: Kidman is actually 21 years older than Efron, while Hathaway is only 12 years older than Galitzine.
The character, Chris, is established to be 34, while in real life, Efron is 36.
At 54, Roberts was (by my best guess) roughly nine years older than her character, who would have been around 45 based on the backstory provided. It’s harder to pin down the exact age of Ryan’s character in What Happens Later, but it’s safe to assume she would need to be at least a decade younger than Ryan herself.
Granted, It’s Complicated came just one year after Streep starred in the musical rom-com Mamma Mia as Donna, a character established to be in her early 40s at the film’s start.
Often, as in Big Little Lies, The Undoing, and Expats, these characters even have children much younger than A Family Affair’s 24-year-old Zara, without the scripts attempting to justify her later-in-life motherhood.
Sex and the City’s fourth lead, Samantha, appears only briefly in And Just Like That…, as actress Kim Catrall famously opted not to return to the main cast for the reboot.
In The Northman, Kidman plays mother to a 45-year-old Alexander Skarsgård. In movie’s defense, though no character’s age is explicit, it seems possible that it’s actually Skarsgård who is aged down for his character, rather than Kidman being aged up. Still, this was just three years after the pair had last played husband and wife in Big Little Lies.