Lisa Cholodenko (2010)
I’d been greatly looking forward to it and my sense of disappointment needs to take that into account. It’s entertaining and well acted, with plenty of smart dialogue, but The Kids Are All Right (which I assume takes its title from the Who song) isn’t that interesting. It’s striking as an illustration of cultural change – this is a film about family values and the parents in that family are two women – but the movie’s structure is time-honoured. The household of Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) and their two children Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) is both different from and the same as a traditional nuclear family – but mostly the latter. Nic and Jules don’t like their son’s hanging around with an unsuitable ‘loser’ called Clay (Eddie Hassell) and are relieved to be told that Laser isn’t, as they’d begun to suspect, gay. Joni and Laser are embarrassed by the ‘Moms’ in company not because they’re lesbian but because they’re parents. You wonder if Lisa Cholodenko is going to use the conventions of coming-of-age and family-in-crisis stories to radical and surprising effect and you find that she doesn’t – although this may be the object of the exercise.
The film’s basic scenario doesn’t rule out either comedy or drama. Nic and Jules each had a child – the girl and the boy respectively – using the same anonymous sperm donor. Joni, who’s just finished high school and is about to start college, and Laser, a couple of years younger, make contact with their birth father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). We watch Paul’s arrival on the scene and how it affects the lives of the family and his own outlook. The tone for most of the movie’s 105 minutes is essentially comic – it stays that way when Jules starts an affair with Paul but, when Nic finds out, the tone changes abruptly. The Kids is categorised on IMDB as ‘Comedy/Drama’ but a full stop rather than an oblique stroke between the two words would be a more accurate description. The film is one thing, then the other. (One element of the climax that does work well is the music. Carter Burwell’s score is pleasantly unassertive for much of the time: the way it builds in the final stages makes you feel that the earlier, quieter bits were undercurrents.)
Nic, a physician and the family’s breadwinner, tends to drink too much and, although she ticks off Jules for ‘micro-management’, it’s Nic who is almost permanently tense and controlling – we come to see that she feels she has to be, in order to keep the family together. Jules trained as an architect but didn’t make a go of it, or of subsequent business ventures. She has stayed at home while Joni and Laser have been growing up; she’s now about to try landscape gardening – although she describes the project in characteristically wishy-washy terms, burbling on about ‘eco-friendly spaces’ etc. She hasn’t any clients (until Paul invites her to take on his place). Neither of these women is a richly conceived character but the partnership of Annette Bening and Julianne Moore is a great success. One particularly good thing is their movement, Bening’s especially. Once described by Pauline Kael as a ‘stunning actress and a superb wiggler’, Bening has developed here a subtly masculine gait and rectilinear arm movements. Moore is surprisingly amusing as she trudges round in her gardening shorts and boots. As she showed in her brief and enjoyable turn in A Single Man (she was the best thing in it), Moore – who has tended to be enervated and irritating playing a serious, reflective character – comes to life, and is not at all coarsened, when she’s more histrionic. It almost goes without saying that Bening’s facial expressions and line readings are superlatively precise and incisive. Mia Wasikowska, who didn’t make a strong impression in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, has a lovely solemnity as Joni; she’s able to suggest a keen, observant intelligence which complements the verbal vitality of her mother.
In a key sequence, two thirds of the way through, Nic, Jules, Joni and Laser go for dinner at Paul’s home. Before the meal, Nic sits tensely on her own, looking through Paul’s LPs – Hunky Dory, Joni Mitchell’s Blue. She remarks on the ‘eclectic mix’ of the collection but what’s remarkable is not its eclecticism but that it seems to belong to someone who came of age in the early 1970s – in other words, someone of Nic and Jules’s generation rather than Paul’s. It turns out, in conversation at the dinner table, that Joni is named for Joni Mitchell and, in her efforts to be sociable and force herself to accept Paul into the family’s life, Nic sings the entire lyric of a Joni Mitchell song. This is one example of where The Kids would have benefited from greater comic edge and preparation. The scene would be more convincing if Paul had found out from Joni herself how she got her name and had arranged his records in a bid to ingratiate himself with Nic. As it is, you’re left feeling that Lisa Cholodenko has decided temporarily to ignore the crucial age difference between Nic/Jules and Paul – who is more or less halfway between the moms and the kids – for the sake of having Annette Bening do the song. (And that doesn’t quite work anyway: you can’t believe that Nic would be able to go all the way through with the singing, especially since – at this stage of the evening – she’s determinedly keeping off wine.)
Paul is the pivotal character and the stronger elements of The Kids include the handling of his relationship with Joni and Laser, and of the tensions between him and Nic. Only nineteen when he donated sperm, Paul is personally shiftless and immature but professionally successful. He runs a flourishing organic produce and restaurant business. Before Jules comes on the scene, he’s in an uncommitted relationship with the most beautiful of the women who work for him (Yaya DaCosta). He rides a motor bike. Although the film is sketchy on the process of Paul’s getting to see the kids regularly, you can believe that Joni finds him attractive and Laser finds him cool. It’s to the credit of the director and the actors that neither the sexual chemistry between Paul and Joni nor the affectionate competitiveness of Paul and Laser is overstressed. (Laser is, as Paul says, a ‘sensitive jock’ – and Josh Hutcherson captures this well. It’s striking that the two male characters are written less narrowly than the female ones.) The mealtime encounters in the film are its high points because they throw into relief Annette Bening’s smiley tension and the uncomfortably sustained amiability of Mark Ruffalo, whose fine performance is likely to be underrated. There’s plenty wrong with the dinner at Paul’s home but the moment when Nic turns emphatically friendly is electric, especially Bening’s delivery of the four words ‘I like this guy!’ The exclamation contains so much clenched, triumphant affability, and so little awareness of its judgmental crudeness, that it comes across as perhaps the most cutting line in the whole picture. What follows – Nic finds Jules’s hair in Paul’s bathroom then continues detective work in his bedroom – is improbably protracted, although Nic’s return to the dinner table, her world having fallen apart in the meantime, is gripping. What doesn’t make sense, given how socially dominant a presence Nic is, is that no one else appears to notice the chilling change in the atmosphere. When they return home and Nic prepares to confront Jules with what she’s discovered, Jules is taken by surprise – she seems to think the whole evening has gone swimmingly.
Lisa Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg slide away from the challenge of many of the situations they set up. Joni’s starting college is going to be a big moment in the family’s life anyway; the timing of the revelation of Jules’s affair with Paul should give Joni’s imminent departure added poignancy but we never get a sense of how the two things interact. When Paul turns up at the house the night before Joni leaves for college, and during a family last supper, Joni has a brief, flustered conversation with him before Nic gives Paul a piece of her mind and slams the door. Even then, he looks hopefully through the window at Laser but is ignored and departs in defeat. No one, after this very upsetting incident, says, ‘What a thing to happen, tonight of all nights’. (They appear to assume it’s only to be expected at this stage of this kind of film.) Cholodenko is evasive in more important ways too. It’s not implausible (it’s quite powerful) that Joni and Laser don’t seem to have any problems with their parents both being women but there’s no suggestion that they’ve managed this in spite of the hurtful remarks they must surely have had from other, less enlightened kids who know about the family. When things go bad, you might expect the candid, intelligent Joni to take Jules to task – it’s one thing to have two moms but a bit much when one of them then comes out as straight – but her frustration as she turns on her parents is childishly vague. And the question of whether Jules’s sexual orientation is more complicated than she’d previously thought is virtually ignored. All we get is a predictable exchange in which Jules accuses Nic of wanting her to be a homebody, of never wanting her to have a life and career of her own. It’s not clear why, if Jules really does feel that, she has an affair with a man. (It’s hard to see in the enthusiastic sex she has with Paul that Jules regards him as a surrogate female.) The film wants to show that sustaining a long-term relationship is tough and that a woman in a homosexual partnership is ready to defend the preservation of the family she’s created just as fiercely as a heterosexual wife and mother. But Cholodenko isn’t prepared to pursue the implications of the particular circumstances that she’s designed for the purpose of making these points. It’s a sign of social progress that a gay relationship can be characterised in the way that it is in The Kids Are All Right but it doesn’t make for exciting cinema.
4 November 2010
