A video featuring men going down on one another (in cowboy costumes, no less) that a suburban couple breaks out when they decide to fool around is undoubtedly the most "gay" thing about The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's terrifically entertaining and moving fourth feature. The fact that the couple in question is comprised of two women, one a serious-minded doctor and the other a scatterbrained job-hopper, factors in only as much as your definition of "liberal" and "conservative" limits your views on family dynamics and, indeed, concepts of right and wrong.

But as the title suggests, the film begins and ends with the two children Dr. Nic (Annette Bening) and earth-mother Jules (Julianne Moore) conceived through an anonymous sperm donor. Both Joni (Mia Wasakowski, much stronger here than in the languid Alice in Wonderland), mere weeks away from collegiate bliss, and Laser (a very good Josh Hutcherson), a pensive jock, come from the same donor but only Laser has the itch to meet the man, evident in a scene where he joyfully watches his borderline-psychotic best friend (Eddie Hassell) literally wrestle with his father. Fulfilling her sisterly obligations while keeping the "moms" in the dark, Joni is the one who first contacts their absentee donor, a restaurateur and organic farmer named Paul, played with reliable intelligence and swagger by Mark Ruffalo.

Unexpectedly, it's Joni who takes to Paul right away, while Laser gets rustled and mildly insulted by his ambivalence to sports; the denim-adorned donor is seemingly too busy putting it to his gorgeous hostess and flirting with a dread-locked hippie at his farm to throw around the ball. Whereas Paul is overwhelmed with his lover man persona, Laser lets their meeting slip while being passive-aggressively grilled over his possible homosexuality by the moms. Hesitant as always, Nic allows the motorcycle-driving Lothario into their house for wine and a barbecue before Paul impulsively hires Jules to redecorate his "fecund" backyard. A shot of Paul hypnotized by Jules' thong as she works and her rousing reaction to a slice of his strawberry-rhubarb pie points to the stormy weather ahead.    

Cholodenko has gone from treating the LGBT community as a seductive society, as she did in her superb debut, High Art, to portraying a singular homosexual couple as, well, suburban. The casting of Moore and Bening, both spectacular and wildly funny, and the film's pedestrian structure could have been shallow attempts at commercial acceptance, but this actually constitutes a risky maneuver on the director's part, one that pays off immensely. The politics and sexuality of The Kids Are All Right are covertly complex or, perhaps more pointedly, so natural that they defy mapping. Either way, they are embedded in the characters rather than guiding them, something that many films strictly about homosexuals have been unable to fathom.

Don't be mistaken: The Kids Are All Right certainly comes from a liberal state of mind but it never belittles or condescends to conservatives, nor does it bark its opinion like so many films of its ilk have in the past. Here, Cholodenko, who co-wrote the script with Stuart Blumberg and who herself gave birth to a boy with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, enters a similar class of filmmaker as Alexander Payne in her handling of serious comedies grounded by complexly drawn characters and urgent social issues. Sideways, it is not, but The Kids Are All Right is, in a particularly dull summer at the movies, a friendly reminder that there are...alternatives.   

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.