Instant Family

Pete (Mark Walhberg) and Ellie (Rose Byrne) feel like there's something missing in their lives so decide to foster a child to fill the hole in their relationship. To get the lay of the land they join a foster scheme and soon enough they've their eye on a troubled teen called Lizzy because they've heard teens tend to get left behind. Lizzy (Isabela Moner) comes with baggage though, baggage in the form of her younger brother and sister Juan and Lita. 2 suddenly becomes 5. Can Pete and Ellie cope with this massive change?

If Instant Family was made 35 years ago by John Hughes we'd look back on it fondly now. Imagine it, Steve Martin and Goldie Hawn. Or maybe Tom Hanks and Shelley Long in a quasi sequel to The Money Pit, as a happy couple who choose to disrupt their ordered existence by fostering 3 siblings. It would be the kind of film that pops up every Christmas to make us feel good for a couple of hours. Instant Family has an odd familiarity to it and feels strangely nostalgic despite being brand new. It's because it's the kind of high concept comedy that used to pop up with alarming regularity throughout the 80s and 90s. It's a simple tale (couple fosters 3 troubled kids) that requires little thought or emotional involvement. Or so you'd think.

It works. It's funny, it's warm, it's upsetting in places. It's self aware (the Avatar mention was welcome) It's a look at a side of family life that rarely gets a glimpse yet effects hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every day. It's a story too that thankfully acknowledges the hardship involved in the foster process. The toll it can take on both parties involved, physically and psychologically. Three lovely performances from Rose Byrne, Isabela Moner and Octavia Spencer ground it while it's story gets under your skin. Coming from Sean Anders. the director of the godawful Daddy's Home I didn't have high hopes for this but surprisingly enough it got to me.

It's not all successful of course. The brilliant Margo Martindale is wasted. A bizarre Joan Cusack cameo sticks out like a sore thumb, feeling like a leftover of a subplot that was snipped away. Also the ending is so insanely cheesy you might actually development a lactose intolerance just from watching but there's enough good here to outweigh the bad. The stupid Hollywood expectations of a foster mother to be. A pair of eager to please grannies, one commited to bribery and the other letting herself be absolutely destroyed to make a child smile. A borderline criminal reaction to a dickpic. The schadenfreude felt by other foster parents when Pete and Ellie assume the honeymoon period with their new family will be an ongoing thing. The fact that the story doesn't shy from the hard parts. Hard parts that have our leads pondering just what they've let themselves in for.

It's easy to see why they fall for their new family though. They might be a little wild as a result of being in the system for a while but they're lovely, especially the protective Lizzy and the temper prone Lita (Julianna Gamiz, tiny, hilarious). Pete bonds with his new kids fast enough but Ellie finds it a struggle and soon wonders if she's maternal enough. Rose Byrne as Ellie sells her apprehension perfectly and you can't help but feel for her on her journey. Octavia Spencer and Tig Notaro add a nice dose of dark humour as the women in charge of the foster scheme too. 2 women who've been in the system for too long and who have to use humour as a coping mechanism to deal with the stupidity of it's red tape. There's a lot of it. It's a bizarre system as we find out and the only way through it is to laugh at it. 

A nice way to pass a couple of hours.