'Family Fang' keeps characters at arm's length

"You think we damaged you?" Christopher Walken's Dad says to his kids, played by Nicole Kidman and Jason Bateman. "So what? That's what parents do."

"The Family Fang," Bateman's low-key second directorial effort following "Bad Words," confirms the Hollywood parental obligation to mess up children as it puts a new spin on the tired Bad Dad formula.

What if Dad spent his life with his wife creating fake bank robberies and other forms of reality-perception hoaxes as works of great deviant performance art?

Sometime-actress Annie (Kidman) and one-time writer Baxter (Bateman) carry the emotional and psychological scar tissue from their upbringing by Caleb Fang (Walken) and Camille Fang (Maryann Plunkett). After a childhood of indentured servitude to create "art" with their obsessive parents (mostly Dad), Annie and Baxter have broken free to pursue their own now-blunted lives.

When the family car is found abandoned with Caleb's blood all over the dashboard, the siblings can't decide if something bad really happened, or if this is just another prank. They really don't care.

And neither, necessarily, do we.

Bateman directs this survival story, adapted by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire from Kevin Miller's 2011 best-seller, with confident subtlety, a choice that prevents the dark comedy from sliding into caricature, but significantly keeps the characters at arm's length.

A key revelation in the mystery feels inserted for effect (no spoilers here) and the drama plays out at a pace that merely flirts with lethargy.

Plunkett's Camille - a wife perhaps a little too dedicated to her spouse - is a priceless performance. Kidman and Bateman replicate the nonverbal shorthand communication that comes with being siblings in the trenches of domestic strife.

Walken rules this comic drama with a precision-pitched performance that's equal parts obsession, narcissism and self-delusion. His Caleb is the kind of guy who can refer to his grown kids as "Child A" and "Child B," and get away with it.