But what about the moms?Cholodenko'a new feature
The Kids Are All Right would make great social satire if it only dared to be funnier and sharper and had more perspective on its material. It's a good joke: a sperm donor turns up 18 years later and gums up the works for an upper bourgeois lesbian couple and the two teens he, in absentia, sired. But this film gets lost paying pointlessly close attention to things like domestic boutique wines drunk by its southern California people. "A petite sirah, how lovely!" Is that funny, pretentious, or just wallpaper? The air is alive with the sound of passive-aggressiveness and free-floating self esteem, but does this movie know how boring and ridiculous its characters' talk is? The observation isn't always keen, or things like the clothes very convincing or specific. All we see is that medical doctor Nic (Annette Benning), the more macho side of the lesbian couple, wears mannish shirts to go with her chopped-off no-nonsense hair and black-rimmed glasses. The ladies sometimes like to clean their teeth in the kitchen with electric toothbrushes, but since that draws our attention, is it supposed to mean something? The large bed they sleep in doesn't. It's a respectable but colorless object that might be found in any posh suburban designer showroom.
Anyway, Nic and Jules (Julianna Moore) aren't going to share that bed for long. Jules moves to the couch once she gets caught having a hot sexual -- heterosexual! -- affair, with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), whose anonymous sperm was the source of both Nik's 18-year-old daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Jules' 15-year-old son Laser (Josh Hutcherson).
Laser has persuaded Joni to contact the cryo sperm bank, now that she's 18 and allowed to, so that before she goes away to college they can meet their biological father. With astonishing ease, Joni and Laser are immediately meeting easygoing, scruffy Paul. As Paul, Ruffalo is just as appealing and untrustworthy as Terry, the visiting deadbeat brother he played in the 2000
You Can Count on Me. Yet despite his laid-back drawl, Paul owns and runs not only a successful restaurant but an organic farming sideline. With a beautiful black girlfriend/sex partner called Tanya (Yaya DaCosta) who wears her hair in a giant Sixties 'fro, Paul is a somewhat improbable fantasy of hippieish machismo. But then Jules and Nic like to make love watching super-macho gay sex videos. Just occasionally -- but we get to see it. Maybe leather-jacket-wearing motorcycle-riding Paul is an extension of those lesbian Colt Studio fantasies.
When the kids meet Paul he makes a "cool" first impression and they like him. Once they introduce him to their at best disconcerted moms, Nic makes a terrible mistake. She gives in and allows Paul to hire Jules to design his organic garden, landscaping being a new business she's starting. With breathtaking speed Paul and Jules start getting it on in the daytime -- so obviously that Jules' Latino gardening assistant Luis (Joaquín Garrido) can't help smirking at her, for which she summarily sacks him.
The idyllic California scene is actually tense, insular, and not a little neurotic, and Jules and Nic have mouths full of psychobabble. When they mistakenly guess Laser may be gay, they don't come out and ask him but mutter vague phrases about how he can talk about anything he likes; Is there something he wants to tell them? Sometimes the cliché jargon brings a smile but these scenes can be slow, especially since Nic, who has an alcohol problem that's never adequately addressed, is an irritating control freak who casts a pall over every scene she's in. It's a brave and typically impeccable performance by Benning, but where is Nic's redeeming aspect? Discovering that her wife has fallen into the clutches of a man is evidently Nic's worst nightmare. But it's never enough of a real threat to her to arouse our sympathies.
The kids are in the process of breaking out of the nest: they'd rather not even be bothered with all this. They are simply disappointed when Paul, their new-found "dad," disrespects their parents' lesbian union, ironically, by delivering his previously useful sperm to one of them in person this time. Briefly he has had a warm relationship with both Laser and Joni, and serves as a momentary springboard to greater independence not only from their moms but from several undesirable friends their own age.
The pivot point is Nic's obsession with control, which is challenged by the arrival of Paul and his affair with Jules. Lisa Choldenko's 2002 film
Laurel Canyon also dealt with parent-child relations in a southern California atmosphere. This time the plotting is a bit more clear-cut, though the film ends rather feebly with Joni being dropped off at college, after Paul's being summarily driven off by Nic. Jules has made a little speech (with the TV turned off for the occasion) about how marriage is a long hard struggle and they're doing their best.
Was Paul really to blame for his affair with Jules? Didn't she play her part? Having bonded so well with Paul, will the hitherto fatherless Joni and Laser not want to have anything further to do with him? Cholodenko still shows a tendency to leave things unresolved, and that's not one of her strengths. Paul's banishment is a crude and unsatisfactory solution. The self-sufficiency of the lesbian household has been proven false, but the movie just runs away to college to escape this revelation.
There are terrific performances by the three principals. But the screenplay threatens to drag to a halt every so often, and the "kids" run the risk of being little more than accessories. Cholodenko and her writer Stuart Blumberg get too lost in detail and are too unaware of the dialogue's inherent silliness to make rich comedy of this, but if the targeted mainstream audience swallows the film's palatable image of lesbian domesticity, that may not matter. This time the director is evidently attempting some wink-nudge mainstreaming of lesbianism. It's going to feel hip to some, but it's not going to convert red-state audiences.
FAQ
Search
Login
