Movie Review: The Kids Are All Right

LITTLE ROCK — Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, is a wonderful thing, intelligent in the ways of human foible, and generous with sinners. There is a compelling warmth to the film, as well as moments of genuine wit and one heartbreaking scene that will feel familiar to everyone who has ever felt the bottom drop suddenly out of their life.

While it’s not the kind of movie that often leads people to make hyperbolic claims (few will scream thatit’s “better” than Inception, though it’s likely more enjoyable for most), it’s a rare sort of Hollywood movie, one that painlessly engages our moral understanding and invites our empathy. It’s sexy and funny and true to human nature.

It is, in its way, a fairly conventionally structured family “dramedy,” with the twist that the parental units are lesbians, played as devoted but fatigued life partners by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore (both of whom will be talked about during awards season).

Years ago, Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) each mothered a kid with sperm from the same anonymous donor. Nic, a doctor, delivered daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and That Evening Sun), while a couple of years later the feckless Jules gave birth to son Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Each of the kids seems to embody some qualities of their birth mom - Joni is a serious overachiever, while Laser is a malleable, good-natured jock.They’re both good, grounded kids, but Laser has a tendency to make dumb choices.

And, since it’s obvious from the way he watches his knuckleheaded friend’s dad roughhouse with his knuckleheaded friend, Laser has at least thought about what it would be like to have a male role model around the house. So when Joni turns 18 he petitions her to contact their father.

Turns out bio dad Paul (Mark Ruffalo) is a footloose, fashionably scruffy Los Feliz organic gardener/restaurateur, who tries hard but doesn’t quite click with Laser, though he bonds immediately with Joni, and a little more problematically with Jules.

If the premise sounds a little sit-commy, understand that Cholodenko collaborated on the script with Stuart Blumberg, the screenwriter of the studio comedies The Girl Next Door (2004) and Keeping the Faith (2000).While Blumberg’s mainstream sensibilities might have seemed ill-suited to Cholodenko’s dark and at times brittle indie movie instincts (her best-known films, High Art and Laurel Canyon, share a downbeat, depressivetone), the two styles mesh beautifully, producing a smart, elegant script that’s funny in a naturalistic key and touched here and there by sparkling, specific grace notes. (Such as Paul’s record collection, and Nic’s reaction to finding a favorite record in it.)

A lot of The Kids Are All Right feels familiar and comfortable, and the filmmakers were savvy enough to stress the parental commonplaces of their familial relationship. They are an old married couple, regardless of what laws may pertain, and their weariness with each other, as well as their reflexive habits of affection, are nothing other than entirely normal. This is the way they have somehow made their family - and they are (all of them, including the interloper Paul) all right.