If you’ve grown weary of independent films about left of center families struggling with their own uniqueness in the face of soulless America, then raise your hand. Okay, I have too; so it was with a little trepidation that I went into the much hyped in film circles The Kids Are All Right. The dangers with these films are always apparent. Are the characters going to be quirky and weird just for the sake of it? Will they be too heaped upon with neurosis and maladies to be relatable? In the quest for dryness and subtlety will the filmmakers go too far and just be boring? And I guess that was my main concern going into a film about an aging lesbian couple struggling to raise a pair of teenagers; that it would just be busted flat boring. Happily, this isn’t the case. The Kids Are All Right, by always presenting it’s drama alongside a healthy dose of legitimately effective comedy and building itself on a foundation of fine performances, managed at the very least to hold my attention throughout. What else director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko was able to accomplish is a bit more of a complex issue, and demands further exploration.
The Kids Are All Right is a film that lives or dies by its characters. The entire film is nothing much more than an account of their lives and how they intersect with each other. If you don’t like spending time with the people the film is about, there isn’t much chance that you’re going to end up liking the film. The thing in here I enjoyed most was Mark Ruffalo’s Paul. Ruffalo has an easy, mumbly-mouthed charm and Paul is a great vehicle for him to develop his on screen persona. Paul is a bit of an enigma, he certainly contains multitudes, and he’s crafted that way so that the other characters can all bounce off of him in different ways; yet he manages to juggle some conflicting character traits without ever feeling false. He’s a bit of a slacker in most respects, but he owns his own business, so he has to be able to apply himself when necessary. He’s anti-team, he quit school, but he bonds with people easily and gets contemplative and intellectual with his conversation. He’s hard to pin down, but fun to explore. Ruffalo’s portrayal of Paul feels effortless and lived in. He almost keeps you guessing as to whether he’s functionally retarded or just really, really comfortable in his own skin. The other characters in the film seem to be caught just as off guard about how to react to him as you are as the viewer. His initial meeting with his long lost progeny is very awkward. Their conversations are stuttered and shallow. They don’t talk to each other like characters in a film having a poignant moment would; they talk like real people. They struggle to connect; they insult and annoy each other. The results are fun to watch and this early scene sets a very realist tone that I wish would have been better carried throughout the rest of the film. Regardless, Ruffalo is the engine that keeps driving the film forward. He’s the catalyst to all the dramatic reactions. Clad in a leather jacket and looking like a hipster Dennis Miller he sweeps into this family’s lives and leaves them all instantly changed.
As I hinted at earlier, the person with the most negative reaction to Paul’s introduction is Annette Bening’s Nic. Nic is a very driven, controlling woman. She clearly takes great pride in her family, and the fact that her children are straight laced, well adjusted, and intelligent. Despite the best intentions, her commitment to maintaining this image makes her a bit of a stick in the mud and causes tension between her and the rest of her family. Any sort of flaw that her kids might exhibit is a direct attack on her perfect, lesbian parenthood. Any problem in her marriage is an out loud mockery of her ability to create a non-traditional family that is just as good as any Rockwellian family values poster. She’s playing a less broken version of her suburban housewife from American Beauty here. She is, at times, completely overbearing and neurotic. She’s a control freak, a perfectionist, and can make herself a chore for others to be around. Paul, then, with his where the wind may blow attitude and patriarchal, genetic claim to her children proves to be her worst nightmare. While the rest of her family makes an effort to spend time with Paul and get to know him better, Nic quietly seethes. The main conflict that comes between all of the parties is a pretty huge spoiler, but it’s the center of why everyone is acting the way they are acting, it’s the thing that kind of turned me off of the film as a whole, and it’s pretty hard to talk about this movie further without giving it away. So, if you’re one of those people who needs to go into a film completely fresh and unaware of its developments, probably stop reading now. For everyone else, let’s dig into some plot details and get into what I didn’t like. Nic, after her family starts spending more and more time with Paul, starts to feel very threatened by him. Perhaps selfishly, she begins to feel like Paul is stealing her family away from her. It is an interesting, believable way for her character to feel, and it could have been an interesting angle to watch play out if the plot had developed more subtly and Nic didn’t quickly become very justified in her feelings. The elephant in the room, the big plot development of the film, is a shared naked and sweaty moment between Paul and Nic’s wife Jules. Very suddenly, and very disappointingly The Kids Are All Right goes from being a very organic, slow paced portrait of an American family, to soap operatic drama. If the moment had been built to more, if it had come later in the film, it probably would have worked; but here it felt forced and out of nowhere, an excuse for the screen writers to get the characters to start yelling and crying. If Nic had resented Paul unfoundedly for a good portion of the film, pushed her family away as a result, and created the tension that led to Jules having an affair, this could have been a lot better paced and more interesting. Instead, Moore’s character acts before we are privy to any problems in her relationship, comes off like a total sleaze, and we can’t help but sympathize with Nic. And I say sympathize, not root for, because Nic is such an abrasive control freak that you don’t really like her either. A film doesn’t really work if you end up actively dreading further time spent with half of its characters. Jules is a shit, Nic is a shrew, why would I want to continue wallowing in these horrible people’s problems? But, despite this flaw in the film’s construction, Bening plays her character like an absolute force of nature and is a great joy to watch. Her performance almost reaches out of the screen and strangles you. When she becomes too much to be around for her family, you feel it, because she’s also become too much to be around for you. The scene where the affair is revealed to her is very well done. The audio of surrounding conversation drops out; the camera focuses only on Bening’s face. She is completely alone at that moment, completely overwhelmed by her thoughts, drowning in a sea of negative emotion. The direction puts us right there with her, makes us focus on the pain and betrayal she must be feeling. For a moment, a very clichéd and heavy handed plotline hits home and hits hard, and it’s in large part to Bening’s performance.
Moore, while not quite as impressive as Bening, manages to give a serviceable performance and craft a believable character of her own. Unfortunately, she becomes a victim of the film’s plotting, and she really has an uphill battle in front of her to get you to feel anything for her character. While her wife is a very focused, driven, and successful woman, Jules comes off as a bit of a slacker. With a couple of failed business ideas, she is now attempting to start a company acting as one of those trendy, new outdoor design people. The kind that combines landscaping and design work to augment natural spaces, but not radically alter them. You know, yuppie stuff; perfect for a guy that has a restaurant that prepares local, organic foods. And once Paul meets the family, it’s not long before he hires Jules to come and remake the back yard of his house. And once she’s hired, it’s not long before Jules is on top of Paul. Once the deed is done, we get Jules’ motivation for the indiscretion as a bit of an after thought. We play catch up with character. She resents Nic for her success, feels pressured by her, never feels good enough around her, doesn’t feel Nic has any faith in her, etc… That’s all well and good, but it would have been nice to see this stuff up front, it would have been nice to develop it in a way that created tension and suspense while we wait for the other shoe to drop. Here, that initial sex scene shocks in a bad way. It feels like an alien intrusion of manufactured conflict into a world that just moments earlier seemed more subtle and mature. In contrast to the sex scene, Moore has a scene later in the film where she apologizes to the whole family for what she has done and how it has affected them. The moment just flat out works. It’s heartfelt, it’s emotional, and it feels real to the characters. In the end I found myself feeling the Jules character had been kind of redeemed, or at least had her actions adequately explained, but a few home run moments didn’t quite make up for the too typical, humdrum dramatics that the affair subplot made me sit through.
With all of this very grown up drama swirling around the three very grown up characters, it’s the kids that end up getting the short end of the stick. Mia Wasikowska is an actress that I’ve heard a lot of good things about, but having only seen her in Burton’s limp take on Alice in Wonderland from earlier this year I didn’t really know what to expect from her, and I was interested to see what she was packing. After watching this film, I’m still kind of left wondering. I did find her to be a soulful actress; she’s able to hint at a deeper thought and feeling behind her eyes than what’s projected. And it’s a good thing, because hinting at deeper things becomes pretty important when your character doesn’t get much to do. Despite her early reservations at contacting their biological father it is Joni, not Laser, who takes a real liking to him and starts to get something out of their relationship. And it’s Joni that perhaps has the most emotional response to the affair at the center of the film. Feeling a bit alienated from and constrained by her mothers, Paul was a new breath of fresh air for her. An authority figure that wanted to watch her grow instead of keep her under control. A parent who was interested in who she is as a person rather than where she is going. When he turns out to be just as fallible as anyone else, Joni takes it pretty hard, and it was where their relationship was going that I was most interested in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go much of anywhere or get much of any kind of resolution. Instead, Joni’s story arch focuses more on wrapping up an almost nonexistent subplot that involved her two friends, one a boy that has a crush on her and is too afraid to make a move, and the other a girl who is acting out sexually. Their relationship comes to a bit of a head at a party where Joni, upset about Paul’s betrayal, acts out in a way herself. It was a strange moment to me, as her unrequited love story hadn’t gotten much focus until then, wasn’t at all interesting, and didn’t seem to relate much to anything else going on in the film. I could have stood to have the whole thing excised completely.
Laser, similarly, doesn’t get much focus in the second half of the film. And maybe that’s the curveball that threw me off. The first act starts by setting up the characters of the children. It is their action that brings Paul into the picture. It was their exploration of their origins and connecting with their biological father that I thought was going to be the heart of the film; and then all of that is all but jettisoned in favor of a love triangle between the adults. What a bummer. I’m not quite sure how I feel about Josh Hutcherson as an actor. Most of the film just requires him to look conflicted and confused, and he’s able to pull that off convincingly, but that may just be a case of him being stupid, not necessarily a good actor. Early in the film when he is palling around with a degenerate played by Eddie Hassell, he is clearly out-acted by the scene stealing side character. This is a kid who is able to commit to the overt douchiness of his character and make something memorable out of only a few minutes of screen time. I wanted to reach into the screen and slap him every second he was talking. He makes it so unbearable that Laser is hanging out with such a creep that you begin to feel like a parent yourself. And probably the biggest moment for his character is when Laser finally realizes that he can do better and walks away. His relationship with Paul is rocky at first, as I think Laser viewed him as a bit of a disappointment, but it was after a talk with Paul that Laser finally wised up and ditched his friend. Laser’s initial bit of identity crisis, journey to meet his father, and then development due to that meeting could have been an interesting story for this film to focus on. Instead it is truncated, pushed aside, and all but forgotten by the end credits.
And it’s this squandering of potential that gets at the heart of how I feel about The Kids Are All Right. It sets up potentially great stories and then instead focuses on pap. It juxtaposes awkward failures of scenes right next to ones that are very well done. One moment a rejected Paul is staring through the picture window of his newly found and lost family’s house looking like a sad puppy in a laughably bad, Lifetime movie moment, and the next Julianne Moore is giving a tear filled monologue about the hardships of marriage that could easily be used as an example clip for the best supporting actress category during the Academy Awards ceremony. The film is a roller coaster of filmmaking ups and downs. The humor all works and the performances are all good, but the visuals of the film are pedestrian and uninspiring. For every good thing I can think to say about The Kids Are All Right, there’s another that comes to mind that’s bad. Overall, I would say it is too well made to fall into the trap of being categorized as one of those completely overhyped, uninspired, cookie cutter indie films. Yet, it was overhyped. It does feel kind of uninspired. Fortunately, it has enough inherent wit and charm to keep me from lingering too long on its faults.The Kids Are All Right
