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Instant Family review: Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne raise hell in an admirably frank foster-parent comedy

Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne star in Instant Family - © 2018 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Mark Wahlberg and Rose Byrne star in Instant Family - © 2018 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.

Dir: Sean Anders. Starring: Rose Byrne, Mark Wahlberg, Isabela Moner, Octavia Spencer, Tig Notaro, Margo Martindale. 12A cert, 118 mins.

Instant Family has been advertised on the sides of buses up and down the country with the tagline “a feel-good movie for everyone”. Before seeing Sean Anders’s new film, I assumed that a subtle play on words or double meaning was going over my head. But no: it’s just a blunt product description, like the label reading “20 tie-top refuse sacks” on a roll of Sainsbury’s bin-liners.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, least of all at the end of awards season, when the unwary cinemagoer, freshly roiled by the fish-eye absurdism of The Favourite and the frenzied docu-satire of Vice, might be in the mood for plainer food. And Instant Family is exactly that: a big, beige armchair of a studio comedy, in which Rose Byrne and Mark Wahlberg’s middle-class married pair, Ellie and Pete Wagner, foster three adorable but testing siblings, and have their painstakingly mood-boarded lives turned back-to-front.

The film is based on writer-director Anders’s own experience of fostering, and successfully mines the key talking points for uncomplicated laughter and tears. These range from the daunting emotional hurdles – how should you feel when the birth mother arrives back on the scene, or when you find yourself fantasising about handing the children back? – to lower-level nuisances, such as friends and relatives’ thoughtless comments. All of them feel anchored in reality, and viewers with first-hand experience of the subject will probably recognise a great deal of it.

Ellie and Pete renovate derelict houses for a living, and they initially seem to regard fostering as much the same thing: sure, they may have been neglected, but just look at the potential! But there’s more to it than that, as the couple soon discover.

Truly seismic soul-searching and taboo-busting are in short supply; there’s nothing like the same degree of introspection you might find in a Judd Apatow comedy, let alone a James L Brooks one. But there’s an admirable frankness to the script, even if it does feel a little self-consciously worked-on at points. Every emotional outpouring, for instance, comes salted with precisely-placed comic asides, many of which are provided by Tig Notaro and Octavia Spencer’s bone-dry social workers.

The film is boosted immeasurably by Byrne and Wahlberg, who make a snappily appealing comic pair and bounce off each other well in the film’s many fraught parenting moments. The eldest of the three children, 15-year-old Lizzy (Isabela Moner), has already by necessity been serving as a surrogate mother to her younger brother and sister, which makes the tension between her, Ellie and Pete more itchily specific than the rebellious teen clichés you might expect. (Those make an appearance as well, though.)

The racial difference between white parents and Latino kids is another flashpoint, and Wahlberg has a funny monologue in the agency office in which he panics about looking like he has a white saviour complex, making reference to Avatar. There’s also a nice dig at the awful Sandra Bullock adoption drama The Blind Side; you sense that Anders may have been waiting a while to get that one out of his system.

The same almost certainly goes for Instant Family as a whole. Looking back over Anders’s CV, you find the two Daddy’s Home films (which also starred Wahlberg), That’s My Boy and We’re The Millers, all of which dealt with the sudden invention or revival of parent-child bonds. That makes his latest film a relatively rare thing: a broad comedy that has a genuine personal touch.