February 10, 2011: The Kids are All Right
The Kids are All Right seemed to capture the mood of a lot of people and the state of society last year, with its raw and emotional portrayal of a middle-aged lesbian couple dealing with their kids growing up, and it absolutely is a big step forward for American society to embrace a story of such a family so openly, but I have to admit I found the film to be overly melodramatic and trying so hard to be “normal” that it ended up seeming way too negative.
Nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Annette Bening, Best Supporting Actor for Mark Ruffalo, and Best Original Screenplay, The Kids are All Right certainly has a solid pedigree behind it. Director Lisa Cholodenko also co-wrote, and as a proud middle-aged lesbian herself she certainly must bring some authenticity (as with High Art in 1998) to this painful story of how a couple, played by Bening and Julianne Moore, struggle with the kinds of things that I suppose all couples deal with as their nests become empty and they have to face up to some of the repressed emotions which have dogged them through the years. Perhaps the relatively short-form nature of a feature film is part of the problem here, since I was never able to come to any understanding of what attracted Bening’s and Moore’s characters to each other in the first place, since they seem to have opposite personalities, and are constantly bickering. Even when recounting their earlier courtship in the “happy” scenes in the film, I still got the impression that they were never really happy or content together. This has nothing to do with the same-sex relationship – it’s always awkward to see characters who have purportedly spent decades together while seeming to have never really enjoyed any of that time.
But the film isn’t entirely about that. Their daughter has reached age 18 and is encouraged by her younger brother to contact the anonymous sperm donor who is their shared father (each of the women had one child with the same donor, so the children are actually half-siblings – pretty cool, actually). After a shaky first meeting which leaves each of the kids with different impressions, they continue to see their father, unbeknownst to their mothers, until the news slips and they have to deal with that elephant in the room. The film gets to explore the topic of the moral and legal obligations of sperm donors in this current age of records opening up when the kids turn 18, and this is layered on top of the relationship woes of the mothers including uncomfortable questions about their actual sexual orientation.
As I began to explain above, despite a few genuine moments, Moore and Bening didn’t seem ultimately believable to me as a couple, but I feel guilty for not trusting the director to have portrayed this in a realistic way. The “tense couple moments” are too broad, which detracts from the more tender moments and makes them seem fake. There are a few contrvived “movie moments” such as when Bening breaks into song during a family dinner, and while the ideas explored in these scenes are good, it’s too blunt a way of presenting them. I found Bening to be just as annoying here as I almost always do; the only time I’ve ever felt that her intensity was correctly placed was in American Beauty (1999), a film which required everyone to be an exaggeration of the type they were playing. Here, she’s just cranked up a few levels too high for the intimate intentions of the film. In the end, as the daughter goes off to college, it turns out that the kids are indeed all right, and their mothers realize that they should perhaps take a page out of that book and get back to what brought them together in the first place. The Kids are All Right didn’t really resonate with me as a complete film, though the themes were certainly worth pursuing.
Melodrama wrecks an otherwise thought-provoking story.