The Family Fang
You might not believe it, but I studied at my university. I studied in the experimental theater wing. So your parents are just two of the most important avant-garde artists of our time.
The Family Fang, as far as I can tell, has no cultural footprint. Despite starring Christopher Walken, Jason Bateman, and Nicole Kidman, I have never heard a single person in real life or otherwise discuss its existence. It feels at the surface level like so many other vaguely independent dramedies that serve as scheduled filler for large but not enormous actors in the 2010s before the rise of streaming supplanted such vehicles. (I say feels like and not is because Bateman directed this and Kidman produced it.)
This is a rich text — which is an odd thing to say about a film that I did not find to be particularly good. There are a lot of moments that more than anything else feel deeply real and correct. And there's a wisdom and maturity in how it portrays the realization that your parents are people too: weird and flawed and miserable and misguided, with aspirations that they know will likely never be fulfilled, but who also exist in a big universe outside of the comforts of your home. There are so many moments of interstitial profundity in glances and asides — likely owing to the richness of its source material, a book of the same name — that you are tempted to forgive the film's sins: its atonality in jumping from mystery to comedy to sweetness.
The final act was bizarre in a way that I will still be digesting, not because I need to decipher its meaning, but because I need to decide if I like it or not.
The final scene is Bateman's character Baxter having finally unshackled himself from his parents — who, it must be said, should be qualified as abusive on charges of incest alone — and having finished his third book, reading it out loud. The name of the book is The Children's Pit, and the prose is truly awful. It sums up the film neatly, though I can't decide if that is meant to be noticed or not.