The Kids Are All Right – Review

Nic and Jules appear the traditional California couple with a nuclear family. Nic (Annette Bening in an Oscar-worthy performance) wears the pants in the family as a type-A controlling obstetrician, worried that Jules (Julianne Moore) is “wasting her potential” when she changes careers for another time. Munching salad at dinner, they clearly love their kids Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), even as they protest their child’s choice of friends and dinnertime cell phone use. They drive a Volvo. Oh, and they’re lesbians. Unlike director Lisa Cholodenko’s first major film High Art (1998), where the identity of lesbians was central topic, here it seems almost like an afterthought. Well, at least until Paul (Mark Ruffalo, before he turns into the Avenger Hulk), the kids’ sperm donor, arrives on the scene.

The Kids Are All Right is a glorious film, full of humor, angst, and heartache. California never looked better: cloudless baby-blue skies and verdant valleys right out of a David Hockney painting. Because the Japanese do not distinguish between blue and green, did this movie appear monochromatic? As the California Kid, Paul grows organic vegetables for his restaurant (Didn’t I just see that same character in I Am Love?), rides a motorcycle, and whips out a bottle of wine from under his leather jacket. The perfect guest. For him, college was “a massive waste of time.” When he tries to fill in as the missing father, both parents and children must make major adjustments. To Thinker Carl Jung, the number four represented wholeness and completion; the fifth breaks the unity. Ever try to get a table for five at a restaurant?

This film should not be confused with rockumentary The Kids Are Alright (1979), which highlighted the first fifteen years of the British band The Who and contains some of Keith Moon’s final performances. Here this inter-generational independent film proves the Kids Are All Right; it’s just the parents who are screwed up.

Rating:

Steve Brock

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