Review of The Kids Are All Right (2010) by Richard B — 29 Sep 2011

Balls of Confusion.

Lisa Cholodenko has created a lesbian fantasy family movie. It is full of old fashioned moral values - except dad is a control freak butch doctor (Benning) and mom is a drippy 'failure'(Moore) and they have two 'normal' kids, a boy and girl so incredibly nice that you want to take them away from all this 'normality.'.

The cause of all unhappiness is - you guessed it - a man named Paul - who was the sperm donor for each of the children. The boy asks his elder sister to find the guy - I mean, why would he ever want to find the 'sperm donor' who, after all, is their father? Anyway, Paul, like ALL the men in this fantasy, is feckless - and a handsome 40 year old (Mark Ruffalo) who owns a restaurant (so he is, at least, not a failure!)BUT has never committed to a woman. Trouble begins when he asks Moore to do some landscape gardening in his new home - and she jumps on him. Being a man, he humps right back - and the rest is all cries and hugs.

What saves this from total disaster is the acting. Benning is good at being a man - she is married to Beatty, lest we forget. And Julianne Moore is the perfect lesbian drip, having been the perfect porn star, the perfect lover of black men in the 1950's, the perfect.... She loves these moral female roles that must make her a favorite of the Christian right. Mark Ruffalo is great at being feckless, and Mia is the perfect lesbian daughter (as she was the perfect Jane Eyre).

Now, what are we to make of this film? Well, it puts forward the idea of a perfect lesbian family, disrupted by men. It shows a tiny bit of the 'dark side' to get us giggling, and then contends that lesbians are just like heterosexuals, only different. How you feel about that idea defines how you respond to the film.

I don't buy it for a second.