My roommate received The Kids Are All Right from Netflix last week and I eagerly joined her when she suggested that we watch it together. That film was #1 on my “Movies I MEANT To See Over the Summer But Never Got Around To” list. While The Dark Knight fans were talking nonstop about Inception, I was more eager to see the lesbian comedy with Replacement Clarice Starling, The American President’s Girlfriend Who Lost the Oscar to Hilary Swank Twice, and That Cute Ruffalo Dude That Was In Jennifer Garner’s Big for Girls.
What appealed to me about The Kids Are All Right? Two things: 1) It seemed like one of the few lighthearted Oscar-bait movies, and 2) I like movie titles that are declarative sentences. I also like that the title uses “all right” instead of the more commonly used “alright.” Maybe it’s just me, but when “all right” is written as two words, I get a delightful, buzzed hippie vibe, aka “The Kids Are Just Fine.” On the other hand, if they used “alright” as one word, I get a very “meh” vibe, aka “The Kids Are Okay. They’re Acceptable.” (The movie does, however, massively fail on one account: The Who song of a similar title does not appear anywhere on the soundtrack).
Anyway, the movie could be called Two Girls, One Sperm Cup (if you’re nasty), as it is about the children of Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) deciding to contact their biological father Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Wackiness ensues. (Warning: The rest of this review contains spoilers, and the trailer below gives away almost the whole damn story).
The Feminist in Me Says… There is some very graphic heterosexual sex in this movie. One instance of heterosexual sex is between Jules and Paul (ruh roh!) The sex between Nic and Jules is less graphic in that you can’t see any naked body parts, but it still involves a vibrator and a head moving underneath the bedspread in act of oral sex. At first, I was annoyed that the only graphic sex took place when a man was involved – and I say this as someone who would rate herself a 1 on the Kinsey scale at the most – but on the other hand, it was only the lesbian sex that occurred within a serious, loving relationship. I did wonder how a gay person might feel watching lesbian Jules having aggressive sex with a man. At the end of the movie, she makes no bones about the fact that she is gay, she loves Nic, and only slept with Paul because she felt too distant from Nic, so I didn’t have a problem with her lapse (in the sense that I bought it, not that I approved of it) – but then again, I’m not a lesbian, and I wondered if a gay audience might feel offended by a gay character having heterosexual sex and enjoying it.
One thing that I absolutely loved about the movie was that each character was flawed and human. Nic, Jules, and Paul all struggled with their identities, and all of their mistakes and transgressions were related to their growing dissatisfaction with their lives. None of them acted out of malice or spite, but acted on their urges. Nic and Jules each thought their partners didn’t appreciate them – their fights were very similar to fights that straight couples have – and Paul tried to discover what he really wanted from his life. The children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) were also characterized well. I liked the Laser, while still eager to know his biological father, exhibited very little “Woe is me, I have no male role model figure in my life because my parents are girls, ewww” whining that I was afraid of seeing. He clearly loved his mothers and even though they occasionally embarrassed him, he didn’t seem embarrassed beyond what is typical of a teenager. Most of all, I loved that each of the five principal characters showed growth and development. Not a single one was a cipher simply used as a prop to further the other characters’ stories. Feminism is always on my brain when I analyze films, but my favorite movies are ones where the female and male characters are given equal opportunity for growth.
The Comedian in Me Says… This movie does “awkward humor” very, very well. I felt embarrassed for the characters on many different occasions, but in an “I’m laughing with you” way rather than an “I’m laughing at you” way. (What’s the difference, one might ask? Think Freaks and Geeks vs. Jackass). Several moments made me literally pull my turtleneck over my face because I felt so bad for the characters and wished I could reach through the screen and give them big hugs. My favorite of these moments was early in the movie where Nic and Jules have to explain to Laser why they like gay man porn. Nic has the more appropriate parental response (“You shouldn’t be going through our things in the first place!”), but Jules feels the need to explain, in her freckled hippie way, that they’re bothered by the “inauthenticity of lesbian porn” because the actresses are usually straight women pretending to be gay, and I wish I could talk about the rest of the scene, but I was laughing too hard to remember what came next.
Also, the lesbians named their son “Laser.” Laser. That’s just funny. I was also amused by Joni’s talk of “hurting Momses’ feelings,” because I’ve always wondered how kids of gay parents deal with two masculine or two feminine pronouns in their spoken language.
The Funny Feminist Decides… The Kids are All Right is a delightful, realistic dramedy that derives most of its humor from the fact that human beings are painfully flawed, and that sex is complicated and weird. The writers do not sacrifice human emotion for the sake of humor – the humor comes from the genuine human emotion.
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Without any humor in the story, this would be a very sad story about a destructive mix of personalities causing havoc in a family. But the film does have a lot of humor in it.
Sorry to comment on an old post, but I just stumbled onto your site.
One of my best friends and I watched The Kids are All Right when it came out in theaters (my friend is a woman who identifies as bisexual/open-minded and has been in a committed same-sex relationship for almost six years; I’m a male who prefers to identify as queer/non-heterosexual, if at all). She and I ended up having very different reactions to the film, though we agreed on a number of issues it contained.
We both had a huge problem with the sex scenes between Jules and Paul. Our problem was less that the sex was graphic, but more that it was happening at all. Neither one of us could really believe Jules when she says that she’s gay at the end of the movie, particularly because she’s shown clearly enjoying the sex with Paul—in more than one scene, if I remember correctly. I can’t remember which one of us said this, but we had this shared sense of ‘if they’d just said that Jules is bisexual or open-minded, or better yet: didn’t bother to label her at all’ then we would have had less of a problem with the sex scenes. My friend also couldn’t buy the ‘lesbians getting turned on by gay man porn’ scene, and frankly neither could I. I have, however, heard other LGBT friends argue about the inauthenticity of so-called “lesbian porn” (i.e. girl-on-girl porn written mostly by and for straight men), so that part seemed legit.
On the other hand, I really, REALLY liked how they treated every character as a human first and everything else second. I could easily understand Jules having an affair, although I wouldn’t condone her actions (“but why did it have to be with a MAN?” my friend argued). Most of all, I loved seeing the family dynamic between Nic, Jules, and their kids. I cannot describe how amazing it is seeing a same-sex couple portrayed as loving, stable parents in a committed, if flawed and dysfunctional, relationship. The fact that their sexuality wasn’t the main source of conflict in the film is what made the movie work for me. Like you said: “their fights were very similar to fights that straight couples have.”
And yes, I liked that they named their kids ‘Laser’ and ‘Joni,’ as in ‘Mitchell.’
For the record, my friend had a bigger problem with the graphic sex in I Love You Phillip Morris, another film we’re divided on. She would rather re-watch Phillip Morris; I prefer The Kids are All Right. Even the promise of sexy, awkward Ewan McGregor couldn’t make me watch that movie again.