The Colombian filmmaker Rodrigo García’s new Netflix movie is a big, inclusive family gathering for a family meal and a little family drama in rural Mexico.
“Familia” isn’t a tale of any cosequence, and a bit of a letdown considering he gave us a Glenn Close/Janet McTeer Oscar contender (“Albert Knobbs”), “Mother and Child” and last year’s “Raymond & Ray.”
“Familia” is as innocuous as its title.
Daniel Giménez Cacho is Leo, the patriarch, who has his many daughters driving in from all over the country for one of their summer outdoor meals at the olive ranch that supports their artisinal “extra virgin olive oil” family business.
“Leo the Lion” his daughters call him.
They will come and eat with Leo and their Down syndrome little brother Benny (Ricardo Selmen) and try to bond with Dad’s new marine biologist girlfriend Clara (Maribel Verdú).
Daughter Rebecca (Ilse Sala) is the oldest, a married anesthesiologist with husband Dan and “the twins” — teens Erika (Andrea Sutton) and Alan (Zury Shasho) in tow. She picks up younger sister Julia (Cassandra Ciangherotti) in the middle of Julia’s latest Tijuana tempest. Her husband’s caught her cheating again and walked out. Her precocious daughter Amanda (Isabella Arroyo) doesn’t know. Yet.
Julia’s an impulsive, narcissistic “writer” sure of her “talent” but lazy and undisciplined. Coming from a “rich” family afforded her all these indulgences.
Mariana (Natalia Solián) is younger still, and very pregnant. She’s rolling in with her latest lover Monica (Natalia Plascencia), who will learn that she “looks like all the others” Mariana has taken up with over the years. Nobody, even unfiltered Benny, is tacky enough to say “short haired and butch” aloud.
And I guess we’ll figure out who the father of that baby is at an opportune moment.
Monica’s concern about acceptance and revealing the nature of their relationship are unfounded. Mariana’s family is hip, tolerant and given to over-sharing, over-questioning — the sisters asking Clara how Dad is as a lover — and over-apologizing.
“Over-sharing is ‘the family glue,'” one wag offers.
Maybe the younger daughters are still rattled by their mother’s untimely death a half dozen years before. Maybe Leo’s extra hard on the one impressionable male, teen Alan, he can perhaps mold in his image or groom to the family business.
“You only get along with women,” is the kid’s astute assessment (in subtitled Spanish, with lots of Spanglish).
Leo, of course, apologizes the way people do in “family movies,” if not most real families.
Maybe teen Erika “kissed a girl” and didn’t “like it” because she wanted to fit in, or our Colombian writer and director was getting all carried away folding Hollywood values and predelictions into his Mexican story of a familia facing a couple of mildly traumatic, dramatically thin “big decisions.”
Erika also apologizes. For not “feeling a tingle” for kissing a girl.
The “surprises” aren’t particularly surprising. The heated arguments blow up, seemingly out of nowhere, even if these indulged, living-their-best-lives kids have had little clue about the strain their father is under. And the cast is big and cluttered, made moreso by including little dollops of the family cook and housekeepers’ love life and troubled past.
“Familia” makes for a pleasantly messy movie that plays and passes the time, but falls well short of offering insight into the human condition in broader terms or the Mexican one in narrower ones. Garcia has made a “We’re all the same” tale that feels a LOT more Hollywood than any “Mexican” melodrama or dramedy I’ve seen of late. The question you ask at the end is “Did we really need that?”
Rating: TV-MA, profanity, sexual conversations
Cast: Daniel Giménez Cacho, Maribel Verdú, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Ilse Salas, Cassandra Ciangherotti, Natalia Solián, Natalia Plascencia, Ricardo Selmen, Andrea Sutton and Zury Shasho
Credits: Directed by Rodrigo García, scripted by Rodrigo García and Bárbara Colio. Netflix release.
Running time: 1:44
