The Kids Are All Right

Nic and Jules (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore, respectively) are a happy lesbian couple with two beautiful children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Without telling their moms, the children reach out to their sperm-donor father Paul (Mark Ruffalo). But, as Paul becomes more involved in their lives, the nuclear family begins to fall apart. Paul unwittingly sets each family member against each other, exposing holes in the family’s framework. With Joni about to move away from home for college, time winds down for the family to work out their problems and come to terms with who they are as individuals as well as with their place within the family.

To begin, all of the actors in this movie were fantastic. But Mark Ruffalo deserves a special mention because his character was so well fleshed out and believable. Ruffalo made us believe that Paul got caught up in his own ego, trying to be the father that he would never actually be. Yet, very subtly, Ruffalo had set us up to realize that Paul lived merely for the moment, with no real thought. And when things fall apart for him by the end, he effectively evokes pity without sympathy – especially with a well-timed quaver in his voice and eyes pleading for help.

This film impressed me because it did not use the lesbian relationship – so central to the story – to overpower the fact that it is ultimately about the meaning of family. The filmmakers could have used that very relevant feature of the story for some heavy-handed shock-and-awe effects. Instead, they chose to simply treat it like any other marriage – dropping the viewers into the middle of it without much exposition, which I believed helped the film overall. The viewers weren’t given an opportunity to develop any opposition to the nature of Jules and Nic’s relationship. Rather, most (though, admittedly, not all) of the strain in their marriage could have been taken out of a heterosexual marriage counseling session, and so the homosexual nature of their marriage was merely an aside or footnote, not the text of the story.

I must say that I loved this movie until the last five minutes or so. In fact, if I put this movie together, I would have ended it with the sequence of the family in the car, with each member looking briefly at the others and then out the window. Instead, the movie ends with a scene that reinforces the theme without adding to it, with one character almost directly stating the moral of the story. I can’t stand it when endings like this are so obviously tacked on to pander to those viewers who can’t wrap their heads around where the characters might be going – those who lack to ability to make informed inferences about what the characters will do beyond the ending based on the actions and dialogue of the characters up to that point. It’s almost as if these people – whoever they are – never grew beyond the fairy tale in which they have to be told that everyone lives “happily ever after.” I personally would have preferred an ending with a little ambiguity because it would have stimulated more discussion. The way it ended, nothing was left unanswered leaving no room for thinking.

Directed by: Lisa Cholodenko

Written by: Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg