Tranquil blue contentedness permeates Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right. The characters’ home is blue; there are numerous shots in which the California haze is absent, as are rain clouds; the people dress in calm colors that blend in with the white, blue, and greenish surroundings. At times, I was tempted to think that I’d somehow stumbled into a shelved Desperate Housewives B-story. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another prime time show with a more developed — and overt — sense of suburban color coordination. Other critics have pejoratively compared Cholodenko’s style to the ramshackle efficiency of television. That’s fair enough, but the banality of the style isn’t really aesthetically offensive; it is succinct, and less intrusive than the hand-held lens flares of J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek, which didn’t even have the common sense to linger on its own futuristic production design. The Kids Are All Right feels homey, and the “TV-ness” of its aesthetic approach dovetails neatly with its thematic concerns.
I enjoyed the fact that the film buttresses middle class norms. It presents flawed characters making bad decisions, but instead of being critical, it just allows that nobody’s perfect, and suckles on those flaws for dramatic purposes. Okay, fine. What killed me is that Cholodenko as a director is much more sure-handed with her middlebrow entertainment than Cholodenko the screenwriter, who trades mostly in cliché and relies upon an incredible cast to bring the mess to life. It must be tough for top tier actors to take such an emaciated husk of a script and breathe sinews onto it, acting out the behaviors of skeleton characters without making the whole thing look like hollow puppetry. Thespians of this caliber apparently thrive on the challenge, because the results are consistently satisfying.
The conceit of a same-sex parents grappling with the sticky issues involved in bringing their sperm donor into their family’s life presents some intriguing possibilities. Cholodenko’s only scores two major coups in the way she presents her material. Firstly, she presents Jules and Nic without the kind of gender role typing that have plagued previous mainstream depictions of same-sex couplehood. They’re both moms, but I appreciated that one of the bones of contention between them is that Jules feels like she’s been shoehorned into the “housewife” role, when in truth neither one of them fits into an easy “husband/wife” corollary. The other coup is that Mark Ruffalo gives the film’s best performance as the homewrecker. Undercutting the archetype by channeling the manifestations of his machismo into neo-hippie grooviness, Paul comes across as the hippest “cool uncle” you’d ever meet, but Cholodenko structures his insertion into the narrative around moments where Paul subtly internalizes the sudden, unexpected appeal of fatherhood and begins to envision himself as replacing Nic (the more forceful personality of the two, and his immediate rival) as the “man” of the house. It’s a razor-sharp rebuke of the way patriarchal presumption creeps into even the most “progressive” of personalities.
Unfortunately, while Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are old hands are generating chemistry and giving a sense of history to relationships that are relatively underdeveloped in the scripting stage (think of Bening’s Oscar-nominated work in American Beauty, or Moore playing off Matthew Modine in Altman’s Short Cuts), their individual characters are accumulations of screenwriting tropes rather than fully-fledged characters. Nic is a perfectionist control freak who drinks a little too much; Jules is a rudderless would-be artist with esteem issues. They’re both devoted parents, yes, but that’s not really a personality trait; it’s a narrative necessity. Even the titular kids, Joni and Laser, are sitcom stock characters, defined if not by their own dimensionless conception, then by the tropes around them that Cholodenko seems to think are actual characters. (And those names: ugh. Joni’s named after the singer-songwriter; Laser’s named after… er, an amplified light beam, I guess. If I were going to go that route, I think I’d just go whole-hog and dub my son “Lightsaber.”) When we first meet Laser, his skateboard punk best friend is peer pressuring him into snorting coke; Joni’s got a crush on her androgynous boy friend, and her girl friend is the obligatory Snarky Slut. It’s the good kid who’s fallen in with a bad crowd and the 18-year-old virgin queen. We’re talking about a movie where a middle-aged lesbian extemporaneously sings a Joni Mitchell song at dinner. I realize that there are a lot of people out their whose wrists are probably scar-free thanks to the Canadian siren, but seriously — there are a lot of scenes in this film that are SNL skits waiting to happen.
And as much as I appreciate the way the film makes a shambling mincemeat of Ruffalo’s phony male feminist, in order for it to happen, he had to seduce one of the moms. As a plot point, it felt contrived, as if Cholodenko felt that she was treading unsurely through the subtle, thorny briar patch of her basic conceit, and needed a strong, melodramatic hook on which to hang Oscar-bait monologues and tearful breakdowns. (Which is a shame, because that scene at the picnic table was rife with dramatic tension, without throwing hetero adultery into the mix.) With all its depictions of textbook passive-aggressive behavior, dialogue exchanges transcripted from self help manuals, and smug satisfaction with its obvious ironies — lesbians who are uncomfortable with their son’s potential homosexuality! Hoodathunk! — The Kids Are All Right feels like… well, just a bit much. A bit impressed with itself for being so damn cosmopolitan.
On the West Coast, a lesbian couple managing to work through one’s betrayal — not only of her spouse but of their sexuality — as part of the hard work of marriage (“just two people slogging through the shit, year after year”) might be treatable with just a bit of therapy. Here in the Midwest, I see it as pulpy melodrama. Chasing Amy got away with its controversial ambisexuality by primarily operating as a comedy. But the delicate scene in which Nic discovers Jules’s infidelity is so clichéd that I expected a sardonic intertitle to punctuate it: “…and then she discovered that Jules had cheated on her… with a MAN.”
Dun Dun DUUUUUUUNNNNNNN!
That kind of pain demands to be felt with a Fassbinder flourish or an acerbic sting. I might have liked this film better had it been made in 1994 by Woody Allen, starring Diane Keaton and Diane Wiest as the lesbian couple, Alan Alda as the donor, and Allen himself as the head doctor at the sperm bank. An edgier companion piece to Allen’s unimpressive Mighty Aphrodite, in other words. But there’s nothing in The Kids Are All Right to accentuate the harsh edge that this particular betrayal would inflict upon a relationship. Nothing except the performances and a nicely framed shot of nearly grown kids retreating down the stairs from where they’d had their ears at their parents’ door. That shot alone did wonders in elevating the film for me.
Cholodenko has made great strides in her career, despite the film’s drawbacks. Laurel Canyon (2002) was an ostensibly penetrating multi-character study about people I found impossible to give a crap about. Nic, Jules, Joni, and Lightsaber may make some questionable choices, but they’re still basically likable people. Watching it persuaded me that I might enjoy sharing a bottle of wine with that family. Watching Laurel Canyon persuaded me that my house smelled like hemp for a week.
The basic draw of TV families is that they are like the neighbors you see every so often at a barbecue. Their kids play with your kids; you drink beer together and exchange anecdotes at school plays. They’re companionable, and their TV problems are either exaggerated versions of yours, or are relatively tame and manageable by comparison. In either case, they exist in a realm of modest fantasy, an modestly idealized plane of imagination where problems are modestly manufactured so they can be resolved within a modest amount of time. When I say that the family of The Kids Are All Right reminds me of a TV family, I don’t mean that as a backhanded compliment. Light drama serves a useful function in that it is easily digestible entertainment that requires minimum investment, but bears enough resemblance to quotidian life that it isn’t entirely disposable. The Kids Are All Right is not disposable. It’s modest and contrived, but it is sincere. There’s a sense of genuine empathy extended to these stick figures and their trope-filled speech bubbles.
The fact is that even a relatively tranquil suburban existence comes with its own emotional turbulence. Even a progressively minded person can rant about organic food, mistreat a Mexican gardener, or entertain chauvinist domestic fantasies. You can almost hear the emphasis in the film’s title: “Well, the kids are all right; the adults could use a little work…” Cholodenko asserts that “all right” is just fine, and that as long as the kids are just fine, there’s no reason to consider the adults a total failure. Most anyone can relate to that. As tempting as it is to dismiss it as trite, I think that’s a bit unfair. It’s the job of a TV family to offer TV homilies, and I liked that Cholodenko manages to do it unassumingly, even with all the contortions her script goes through in order to put her characters through the wringer on our behalf. She’s not seeking high praise; she’s seeking to reassure us that things are all right. It’s a modest goal, and she wobbily achieves it.
And I don’t see anything at all wrong with that. I think it’s rather nice.
Catecinem 
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