The Kids Are All Right

The Kids Are All Right (Cholodenko, 2010) - **

One big happy family.

The Kids Are All Right, apparently this summer’s feel-good triumph, has a lot going for it – uniformly sterling performances from a uniformly sterling cast, working with a rich premise supported by writing strong on character establishment and rife with genuine, well-earned laughs. But the film, the talented Lisa Cholodenko’s first in over five years, uses its breezy comic ease to mask it’s unsure handling of the juicy-yet-thorny subject matter it never quite knows how to approach holistically. There’s a lot of stuff in orbit here, but in the end what needed a Big Crunch gets a long, slow heat death.

HUGS!!!

Portrayed brilliantly by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, Nic and Jules are a Californian couple (referred to by their kids as "momses"), the first a high-string wine guzzling physician, the later a New-Agey would-be-landscaper waif, living with their two children, high-achieving Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and directionless Laser (Josh Hutcherson), each from one mother, each from the same sperm donor. That donor is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), motor-biking locally-farming restaurateur, whose discovery by the kids sucks him into the family. Little need be said beyond “hijinks ensue,” and while each character is beautifully drawn (I love, for example, that Nic and Jules watch “Locked Up Abroad;” I also love that when Joni's namesake finally comes up the sing-along isn't between who you'd think), when put into play they get less, not more, interesting as the film progresses.

You want special sauce with that?

The outcomes of Paul’s entry into the family are either ballsy and outrageous or surprisingly mundane, depending on how you want to interpret it. Yet another tale of middle-aged ennui and teenage angst/discovery - is the banality the point? Cholodenko doesn’t seem sure herself, and the film seems to drift forward without knowing which aspects of its plot are supposed to be commenting on the others. A film bursting at the seams with things to say but blurred and blunted by an unwillingness to choose which, muse on a title putting focus on the children even as most of the screen time is devoted to the adults. Dragging painfully in its final minutes even as a key character’s fate is left oddly unresolved, find a movie whose ambiguity is born not out of confidence but a lack thereof, whose assured handling of the camera and character building dissolves into air as the film goes on. Given its strengths, it feels worse than if it just plain stank. A real shame.

(Cross-posted at "The Thin Green Line")