http://www.slate.com/id/2259922/
The Kids Are All Right
The movie we've been waiting for all year.
By Dana Stevens
Posted Thursday, July 8, 2010, at 6:15 PM ET
(http://img.slate.com/media/1/123125/122954/2241435/2259844/100708_MOV_kidsAllRIghtTN.jpg)
Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right (Focus Features) is the movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs. And it leaves you feeling wistful for at least three reasons: because of what happens in the story, because the movie's over, and because there aren't more of them this good.
Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are a middle-aged lesbian couple in Los Angeles with two teenage children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). Nic, a physician, is the breadwinner of this stable, well-off family, while the unfocused Jules has vague plans to start a landscaping business on her partner's dime. Near the start of the movie, Joni, at her younger brother's urging, calls up the sperm bank that provided their mothers with genetic material 18 years ago. Behind their mothers' backs, the siblings make contact with their hitherto anonymous biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a hedonistic restaurateur who's flattered by the attention but unsure how to proceed. Gradually, Paul is incorporated into the fringes of the family: The children bring him home for an excruciatingly awkward lunch, and against Nic's wishes, Jules takes on the job of landscaping his yard.
It's fitting that gardening—Jules' landscaping project, Paul's achingly trendy farm-to-table restaurant—plays such a large role in The Kids Are All Right, because the movie is at heart about the ecosystem of a family, and the way that system changes when an exotic species is introduced. The presence of Paul changes everything, exposing fault lines in Nic and Jules' relationship and forcing the children to defy their mothers and reassess their peer friendships. (A subplot in which the introverted Laser finally stands up to his jerky best friend is particularly well-handled.)
In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Nic unleashes her hostility toward Paul in an icy diatribe about the organic-food fad: "If I hear one more person say how much they love heirloom tomatoes, I'm going to punch them right in the face." Without ever making the comparison outright, Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg draw a parallel between the aspiration for organic purity and the myth of the perfect family. However assiduously you cultivate your garden, they suggest, there's no predicting what might crop up by surprise or how it'll grow.
In a movie whose story hinges entirely on how the characters treat one other, the acting here is really interacting, and this stellar ensemble cast gets it exactly right. Bening makes Nic a force to be reckoned with: an acid-tongued workaholic who loves her wine a little more than she should but who's such lively company you understand what Jules sees in her. A scene in which Nic sings Joni Mitchell's "All I Want" a cappella at a dinner party veers from embarrassment to exaltation—and then back to embarrassment again.
The ever-astounding Julianne Moore finds lots of layers in Jules: passive-aggression, vulnerability, coquettish vanity, sexual hunger. Ruffalo just Ruffaloes it up, playing the kind of part that's been his subspecialty since You Can Count on Me: the immature but well-meaning and rakishly sexy scamp. And as the kids who aren't always, but eventually will be, all right, Wasikowska and Hutcherson are tentative and tender and convincingly sibling-like. The scene in which the family drops the college-bound Joni off at her freshman dorm will wring tears even from the few audience members who made it dry-eyed through Toy Story 3.
More than anything, The Kids Are All Right is a film about marriage. Not about gay marriage in particular, though the portrait of this couple's decades-long bond underscores the absurdity of the debate about what to call same-sex unions. Cholodenko, who has a donor child with her partner, isn't making a rah-rah commercial for alternative families—in fact, some gay viewers may bristle at the movie's less-than-orthodox take on lesbian sexuality and the complications of donor parenthood. What Cholodenko has aimed for, and achieved, is something bigger: a serious and funny film about the simple yet incomprehensibly fraught act of moving through time with the person you love.
(http://dgt1.net/manny/mblog/images/focus+features.jpg)
I like Focus Features, they are my absolutely favorite production company.
(http://dgt1.net/manny/mblog/images/focus+features.jpg)
;) ;D
http://movies.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/movies/09kids.html?hpw
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/misc/nytlogo153x23.gif)
Movie Review
The Kids Are All Right
NYT Critics' Pick
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/07/09/movies/09kidsspan-1/09kidsspan-1-articleLarge.jpg)
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in “The Kids Are All Right.”
Meet the Sperm Donor: Modern Family Ties
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: July 9, 2010
I’m tempted to start this review by falling back on a tried-and-true movie critic formulation and saying something like “Lisa Cholodenko’s ‘Kids Are All Right’ is the best comedy about an American family since ...” Since what? Precedents and grounds for comparison seem to be lacking, so I may have to let the superlative stand unqualified for now.
Which is fine: Ms. Cholodenko’s film, which she wrote with Stuart Blumberg, is so canny in its insights and so agile in its negotiation of complex emotions that it deserves to stand on its own. It is outrageously funny without ever exaggerating for comic effect, and heartbreaking with only minimal melodramatic embellishment.
But its originality — the thrilling, vertiginous sense of never having seen anything quite like it before — also arises from the particular circumstances of the family at its heart. There is undeniable novelty to a movie about a lesbian couple whose two teenage children were conceived with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. Families like this are hardly uncommon in the real world, but Ms. Cholodenko (“Laurel Canyon,” “High Art”) and Mr. Blumberg have discovered in this very modern arrangement a way of refreshing the ancient and durable wellsprings of comedy.
“The Kids Are All Right” starts from the premise that gay marriage, an issue of ideological contention and cultural strife, is also an established social fact. Nic and Jules, a couple with two children, a Volvo and a tidy, spacious house in a pleasant suburban stretch of Southern California, are a picture of normalcy.
Which is to say that they are loving, devoted, responsible and a bit of a mess. Some of this is midlife malaise: not quite a crisis, at least not at first. Nic (Annette Bening), an OB-GYN, is the breadwinner and principal worrier. Jules (Julianne Moore), who has dabbled in various careers while taking care of the children, is restless and maybe just a little flaky. They are comfortable with each other, more or less content, but also frustrated, confused, a bit out of sorts. As I said: normal.
It is almost impossible to find the right shorthand for these women. Their speech patterns and habits certainly seem familiar. The screenwriters’ ear for the way therapeutic catchphrases and hazy insights recalled from college reading lists filter into everyday conversation is as unerring as Ms. Moore’s offbeat comic timing or Ms. Bening’s tactical use of silence. But though they are recognizable, Nic and Jules are hardly predictable; they are not types, but people, and the acid of satire is applied to them sparingly and sensitively enough to avoid corroding the essential empathy that grounds the movie.
Of course, in every family empathy has its limits. Nic and Jules don’t always communicate very well, and their children — the 18-year-old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and her 15-year-old brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) — have reached the stage when parents seem like alien, irrational and outmoded beings. Your parents are supposed to understand you (not that they ever can), while you have no choice but to tolerate them.
Joni, about to leave for college, is trying to figure out the terms of her fast-approaching independence, while Laser follows along behind his best friend, a bullying goofball named Clay (Eddie Hassell). Laser’s wide-eyed fascination at the sight of Clay rough-housing with his father registers curiosity and barely articulated longing. What would it be like to have a dad? To help him find out — and to shut him up — Laser’s skeptical, kindhearted sister tracks down the sperm donor, who turns out to be a restaurant owner and organic farmer named Paul.
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/07/09/movies/09kids-2/09kids-2-popup.jpg)
From left, Josh Hutcherson, Mia Wasikowska and Mark Ruffalo in "The Kids Are All Right.
The shorthand description of Paul is that he is played by Mark Ruffalo, with specific reference to the goodnatured, feckless brother Mr. Ruffalo played in “You Can Count on Me.” Paul is sort of like a cleaned-up, more self-confident version of that guy, with the same hesitant intonation, crooked smile (behind a graying goatee) and slightly dangerous charm. When Joni calls him, Paul, a good sport and a bit of an adventurer, gamely accepts her invitation to meet the family (“I love lesbians!”), and his relaxed manner smoothes over an awkward initial meeting.
Much more awkwardness will follow, along with some real emotional peril. Nic and Jules are not won over at first — “a bit full of himself” is their not inaccurate verdict — but he manages to connect with both Joni and Laser in ways that their moms can’t. His position as a sympathetic outsider grants him insights that the family members lack, and in turn Joni, Laser and Jules come to see him as a confidant and counselor, a special kind of friend.
But nothing is more disruptive to domestic order than an unattached heterosexual man. In mid-19th-century America, anxiety about guys more or less like Paul drove movements for social and religious reform, and Ms. Cholodenko suggests that those advocates of temperance and other remedies may have had a point. Not that Paul, an effortless seducer (of at least one co-worker and at least one lesbian mom), is exactly the villain of the movie. He starts out too good to be true and winds up causing a lot of trouble, but at the end he’s more scapegoat than demon, and the filmmakers forgive him even if the other characters cannot.
Along the way, Ms. Cholodenko somehow blends the anarchic energy of farce — fueled by coincidences and reversals, collisions and misunderstandings — with a novelistic sensitivity to the almost invisible threads that bind and entangle people. The performances are all close to perfect, which is to say that the imperfections of each character are precisely measured and honestly presented.
There is great music too, both on the soundtrack and, in one extraordinary scene, sung a cappella at the dinner table. (It’s Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” beautifully harmonized by Nic and Paul). The title is a musical reference, of course, to a song by the Who, a good choice for all kinds of reasons. Another one might have been the name of a lovely ballad of enduring love recorded a few years ago by Emmylou Harris and Mark Knopfler: “This Is Us.”
“The Kids are All Right” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). There’s sex, kids.
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT
Opens on Friday nationwide.
This movie has been designated a Critic's Pick by the film reviewers of The Times.
(http://dgt1.net/manny/mblog/images/focus+features.jpg)