'The Kids Are All Right': A Modern American Family
Luisita Lopez Torregrosa
Correspondent
Posted:
07/9/10
With the nationwide opening Friday of "The Kids Are All Right," a nearly perfect movie, a Sundance award-winner now gathering acclaim, we can declare with some certainty that stodgy, conventional Hollywood has finally made the great cultural leap to bring to the screen an exceptional picture of a perfectly normal lesbian couple and their children -- a modern American family.
But, of course, there has to be a crisis and there has to be a catalyst, a way to lift to the surface the hostilities and insecurities that lie just below the surface: the boredom and complacency and the irritation and annoyance that comes guaranteed to couples -- straight or gay -- who've been together for 20 years.
Heartrending, occasionally funny, tearfully profound, "The Kids Are All Right" is the first U.S. film to portray a lesbian couple with kids just like most families -- ordinary, sane, stable, caring, and flawed. We've got two strong middle-aged women raising two teenagers, a sullen but gentle 15-year-old boy and a sweet but whip-smart 18-year-old girl.
It all makes for a postcard. No clouds on that sky.
But, of course, there has to be a crisis and there has to be a catalyst, a way to lift to the surface the hostilities and insecurities that lie just below the surface: the boredom and complacency and the irritation and annoyance that comes guaranteed to couples -- straight or gay -- who've been together for 20 years.
That's etched on the middle-aged faces of Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) -- wonderful, powerful, expressive faces barren of heavy makeup and nicks and tucks. They've been together since college, at UCLA, and now they've got the markings of American normalcy and success: children (via the sperm of an anonymous donor), a cozy suburban home, a Volvo station wagon, a comfortable routine, morning pecks, sit-down dinner at home.
But there's also the rolling of eyes, the bickering over minor domestic infractions, the ardor-less sex that has become an obligation, and the needling daily resentments. Nic, the eldest of the couple, is an OB-GYN and the family's breadwinner; Jules is the housewife, a dabbler, importing Balinese furniture one day, landscaping another.
It all goes to show that 20 years together is an eternity in many marriages, and that's no different with gay and lesbian unions. Actually, many marriages and relationships, straight or gay, last half that time.
It is around this stage in their lives that the boy, Jules' birth son, named Laser, a drifting daydreamer who lacks his co-mom Nic's rigid discipline and intellectual curiosity, seeks out the identity of his father, the spermster. Laser's sister, the more mature Joni, who is Nic's birth daughter, wants no part of the search for Sperm Dad but finally caves in to her brother's pleas and, after phone calls to the data bank, finds him, tells brother Laser, and the three arrange to meet without telling co-moms.
Mark Ruffalo (Paul) is the donor who produced the children. Sperm Dad is a cool customer, sexy, laid back, owns a locavore restaurant, rides a motorcycle, speaks in studied soft tones, through his nose, hardly moving his mouth as if his jaws were wired shut. He's got a great bod, thick shocks of hair, suckable lips, virile hairy chest. No wonder a high school classmate tells Joni, "Spermster's a hottie."
Sperm Dad may be great buddy or boyfriend material, macho, athletic (we see him naked quite a bit), apparently a big success in bed, but he is bad father material.
You can foresee marital disaster unfold way before it arrives on the screen. It's not a spoiler to tell you that he and Jules have sex not once but several times. She, surprisingly, expresses no guilt, no fear of discovery, no second thoughts. She throws herself into his bed with a ferocity that she fails to feel in bed with Nic. She knows it's wrong, surely, but as long as Nic doesn't find out, Jules is blithely going along with the affair.
The ease with which she fell into his arms, her responsive body, her nonchalance about her infidelity, or what I took as nonchalance, all give credibility to the old tenet that most lesbians are just waiting for the right straight guy to come along to switch sides -- to find their real femaleness.
That's a theory, not often said out loud anymore, maintained by some straight men and women, and those who believe that homosexuality can be "cured."
Watching the Jules-Paul scenes in bed might be tough on lesbians whose relationships are on thin ice, or who suspect that their partners may prefer men, or who had it happen to them.
But luckily Nic and Jules are no stereotypical lesbian couple, and the film's director, Lisa Cholodenko ("High Art," "Laurel Canyon"), who is gay, has the sensitivity to and clear-eyed understanding of lesbian relationships and what runs them into the shoals and what can save them from crashing.
Here, she is directing elite actors who uniformly give elite performances. Bening and Moore, principally, who are not gay, are totally convincing, mesmerizing, hypnotic. Their love is flesh and blood. You feel it in your bones. Bening is unforgettable, her face registering layers of emotion without ever going overboard; Julianne Moore can never be less than great, and she doesn't miss it here. They make a great couple. They make great moms. We want to cheer them on. We want to keep them together. We want to remember them not only as what and who they are, but as what all of us could be.
"The basic joke here, and it's a rich one, is that the dynamics of gay marriages differ little from those of straight marriages,'' wrote Joe Morgenstern, the Wall Street Journal's critic. "But that joke also serves as a catalyst for some startlingly beautiful considerations of age and youth, family values, and, before and after everything else, the value of family."
Gay marriages are a hot button, and the film opens just a day after a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that a section of the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as a legal union only between a man and a woman, is unconstitutional. But this issue and its battle in courts East and West, does not come up in the film. There's no political talk of gays and lesbians and their rights. The film doesn't push an agenda. It doesn't need to. It's not a banner, it's not a tract. It is a simple story about a complexity of feelings, about devotion and betrayal, and family. It speaks for itself.
The film assumes, the New York Times critic Tony Scott observed, that "gay marriage, an issue of ideological contention and cultural strife, is also an established social fact."
If not now, soon.