Review: The Kids Are All Right

By Alex Bleiberg

Maybe we should be surprised that Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right hasn’t produced any kind of dustup or backlash. Most mainstream(ish) movies that explore same-sex relationships still tend to generate at least some controversy, but compared to what happened after the 2006 release of Brokeback Mountain, the response to The Kids Are All Right has been pretty tame.

You can probably chalk a lot of this up to changing attitudes. But I think it also comes down to the differences between the two movies.Brokeback Mountain is an extraordinary story, outside the range of normal human experience. The Kids Are All Right is different. Not that all families resemble Nic, Joni, Laser and Jules, or that most people meet their biological father when they turn eighteen, but as hackneyed as it sounds, The Kids Are All Right is about life—normal life—with all its complications and mix-ups. It is a particular story about a particular family, and it aims to be universally relatable. I think, as a result, it’s a harder movie for people to really get upset about. But I also think that it’s ended up disappointing some of the people who have been waiting specifically for a movie about LGBT families.

In The Kids are All Right, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play Nic and Jules, two middle-aged women who bring to their relationship the same improvisation, playfulness, and tenacity that they bring to raising their teenage children, Laser, a loafing, kind-hearted skateboarder, and his precocious, bookishly inclined older sister, Joni. When the movie opens, Laser is in the process of trying to convince Joni to call the sperm bank and set up a meeting with their shared biological father (she’s just turned eighteen, and now old enough to make the call). Enter Paul, the successful owner of an organic restaurant, played by an (as always) extremely likeable Mark Ruffalo.

The movie is about a family struggling to maintain its homeostasis as it pivots through a series of disruptions and transitions. But I think a lot of viewers were bothered by the fact that (spoiler alert) one of those disruptions comes in the form of a romantic entanglement between Paul and Jules. Of course a movie needs conflict. But to some people, introducing a male figure into the lesbian partnership seemed to send a secret message: that same-sex relationships can’t really stand up on their own, or at least that by themselves they’re not dramatically compelling. I’ve heard the movie’s defenders counter that Cholodenko is just trying to show how random, messy, and unexpected life can be. The movie could have simply been about Nic, Jules, Laser and Joni, but that’s not the movie Cholodenko chose to make (so the argument goes).

Dana Stevens of Slate, for example, writes: “Cholodenko…isn’t making a rah-rah commercial for alternative families…what she has aimed for, and achieved, is something bigger: a serious and funny film about the simple yet incomprehensibly fraught act of moving through time with the person you love.”

I agree with that take. But at the same time (and this might just be a zany theory of mine), I think Paul is in the movie for a reason (and not just the obvious plot reasons). I think that, strangely enough, having Paul in the movie, along with an infidelity side-plot, serves to make this movie more familiar to audiences. It links this movie, with its relatively novel subject matter, to the movies we’ve already been taught how to relate to. It’s a bridge between familiar movie territory and the uncharted terrain sketched out here. LGBT families are a new subject in movies. Infidelity? Not so much. It’s regrettable, but I don’t think it reflects any kind of hidden anti-gay bias.

For me, the takeaway theme from The Kids Are All Right is “all-rightness.” Some movies show us characters ruined by their mistakes. In The Kids Are All Right, there is room in the world for bumblers, for mistake-makers, for the destructively spontaneous. Bad things (or bad decisions) happen to families, but they can be hammered out, soldiered through, and resolved. It’s a movie that’s closely attentive to how families adapt and survive. And it manages to introduce moviegoers to a kind of family that might exist outside of their own direct experience, while reminding them of their own lives in the process.