The Kids Are All Right – Lisa Cholodenko



Embarrasssment defines and divides Americans and Brits. Movies reveal this. For Americans embarrassment is funny: for Brits embarrassment is, well, embarrassing. Films like Meet The Fokkers or any comedy with Robert de Niro in it demonstrate this perfectly. Ben Stiller is the patron saint of embarrassment humour.

There is an instinct for schadenfreude in American humour that the more innocent British funnybone lacks. Its not just humour: its sex and emotion too. The Kids Are All Right is an embarrassing movie: full of embarrassing situations and characters. Indeed it is the first movie I can remember where the actors seem embarrassed by their own characters.

Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are an unconvincing lesbian couple with two kids, Joni and Laser, from the same sperm donor. Joni after Mitchell and Laser after failing to think of a remotely sensible name for a boy.

Gynecologist Nic (Bening) is a tautologically tight-assed, anally retentive control freak whose post-prandial wine intake exposes her to being found drunk in charge of a speculum. Jules (Moore) is the polar opposite to Nic's analytic emotional pathology: instinctive, intuitive and under-achieving measured against Nic’s professional earning power.

This rampantly co-dependent odd couple find common ground by watching gay manporn to get it on, not up, in bed. I’m no expert in such exotic erotica but if I were, per impossibile, a lesbian, I would hate this movie. This does of course set up the excruciatingly embarrassing, therefore hilarious scene when Laser and his sociopathic dudemate first find and then are caught by Jules, watching the aforementioned dickfest.

The kids decide to seek out their biological donor father. Enter Paul (Mark Buffalo – sorry Ruffalo): a testosterone-drenched vision in distressed black motorcycle leather. This often engaging actor who appears to have hair where even a gorilla would have skin, is reduced throughout to an amiable aw shucks embarrassed shuffle. De rigeur for Hollywood these days, especially with female directors – here Lisa Cholodenko – Paul has the emotional age of a slow-witted 3-year old and zero emotional intelligence, whatever that is. Just the kind of guy who would donate sperm at “60 bucks a pop” because “it seemed more fun than giving blood.”

Shaggy shagger Paul first bonds with his test-tubular offspring then inevitably shags one of the ‘mumses’. Jules is the lucky recipient of this penetrating beneficence and stereotypically welcomes the uncoiled Paul appendage with a delighted “hello” as if greeting a long lost but never forgotten friend. Hardly pausing to shed her wellies – she’s supposed to be ‘designing his garden’ – Jules re-introduces Paul to sperm donation: but freebies this time.

When Nic spots Jules’s long hairs sluttishly clogging up Paul’s shower drain her bisexual s**t hits Nic’s monogamous fan. If dear reader, you find my language here a shade inelegant, even indelicate, please know that it strongy echoes Cholodenko’s screenplay.

Paul of course hasn’t actually shagged Jules back to her heterosexual senses and after a suitably embarrassing confessional mea culpa monologue to her squirming family, Jules is forgiven and normal homosexual tranquility reigns again.

It’s hard to take any of this seriously. No amount of clench-jawed womanly snogging between Moore and Bening convinces us of the authenticity of their relationship and the sub-text is clearly that as a guy Paul naturally has a more comfortable intimacy with a specimen cup than either of the mothers of his children.

Considerable acting talent is squandered here on a sexually and emotionally confused and confusing screenplay and some simply lazy small part casting and direction. Not quite as embarrassing as watching an episode of the Apprentice – but getting close. And not as funny.

Well, as a straight woman, I loved it. I loved seeing a movie about lesbians that weren't lipstick'd for one thing and where their sexuality was secondary to the premiss that being a parent was difficult. I thought the acting was excellent from everyone - I particularly love Mark Ruffalo in anything.

Just saw it this evening. If you're looking for credible analysis, OK - maybe don't bother. But if you're after an enjoyable and, yes, funny experience, then it's worth the trip to the cinema. I think the point is - don't take it too seriously.

Chris

I agree Chris.

Have been looking forward to seeing this for ages; still am. Thought it all looked very entertaining in the trailer. I absolutely loved the Focker movies so I think we have different tastes
Thanks for taking the time to post the review but must admit I'm surprised by how much you disliked it given the good press reviews I've read. Must go see it - whenever it arrives in Malaysia - and see for myself
Jo

Zettel

I ought to have mentioned that, although I disagreed with some of your conclusions, I thought your review was interesting and well-thought out. Definitely worth posting.

Chris

Zettel,

Something I've noticed is how fine the line appears to be between brilliant and embarrassingly bad with a lot of US indie films. For example, I loathed Juno but really enjoyed Adventureland. On the surface, there isn't much difference: the characters and situations are similar. But for me one is far less clever than it thinks it is while the other underplays its intelligence to a subtle and satisfying effect. One thing that often seems to be the case, is that critics tend to favour the Junos of this world. It's like that creepy tosser who wrote The Squid and the Whale and another one just as bad: critics loved it because it seemed to be intelligent, even though it was anything but (for me at least).

Similarly, the critics on the whole seem to love The Kids Are All Right, but from your review I can tell it's going to be one I'll probably hate.

And sometimes an indie film manages to pretty much unite critics and non-critics, like 10 Things I Hate About You. Just wondered if you had any thoughts on the nature of that fine line.

Terry

Chris - Thanks for the comment. Appreciated.

Terry I do so agree with you about Juno as my review here on writewords indicates.

The link between TKAA and Juno for me is what strikes me at least as a kind of phoniness in narrative and language. Juno's story has more credibility I think than TKAA. There its the language that's slickly, knowingly false - what a mid-thirties writer could pastiche of street/teen talk.

Sorry 'guys' but it is the characterisation and narrative of TKAA that rings so false to me. Also, unlike Juno, TKAA can't make up its mind whether it wants to be be a poignant drama or straight out comedy. This often happens and always makes for a film that falls short on both counts because its tone becomes so uneven and confused.

We can't analyse humour and shouldn't try to question or analyse taste. Mine is no better than anyone elses. But just for once to clarify.

I took TKAA seriously because it invites us to. This is no broad comedy a la the Fockers. So what of the characters?

The sub-text of this narrative, the mumses relationship and Jules and Nic as characters as depicted, is that lesbian sexuality has no independent authenticity - Nic and Jule's big turn-on is gay male porn; and Jules takes immediately to a proffered penis like a reformed alcoholic to a shot of Johnnie Walker Blue. You know you want it: you know you've always wanted it etc etc. This isn't my area of expertise but as portrayed, it seems to me Jules and Nic are hopelessly immature, suffering apparently from terminal penis envy and with the parenting instincts of a rigid headmistress and a half-baked hippie.

So called Gynecologist Nic imbibes industrial quantities of wine every night making one pray she's never on call. And while we all, including me, love to wallow nostalgically occasionally in that anthem to disillusioned romantics - Joni Mitchell's Blue - most of us stop short of singing half the tracks over dinner while weeping for a lost something or other. Jules meanwhile falls for the hairiest, butchest, sperm-donor on the block.

The other prejudice or stereotypical assumption I guess about lesbian parents is the damaging lack of a male role model. And sure enough, while Joni is strong and independent, Laser is a bit of a wimp. He not only doesn't have the moral courage to stop his mate searching through his mother's bedroom, but when they find the porn he promptly sits and watches it with this creep. Later, when incomprehensibly this sociopathic pillock is about to pee on a stray dog and smacks Laser in the mouth he just slinks off.

And Paul? Mid-forties, unmarried, apparently chuffed to have laid a lesbian who it seems he wants to settle down with in a way he can't with his girlfriend. He's harmlessly dumb and well-meaningly inept - thanks Lisa twas ever thus. Unintentionally on screen but not in the narrative the real chemistry we sense would be between Paul and Nic, not Paul and Jules. So implicitly another lesbian bites the dust.

So that's why I couldn't take these people seriously. And by the way the scene where the friend supposedly tries a skateboard jump is just lazily stupid - even Tony Hawks can't drop vertically off a roof without hurting himself.

At least it didn't have a dog humping a cuddly toy - another winner in the embarrassed laughter stakes.

Sorry guys - too long. Not to be repeated.

Z

I take your point about humour, but what about tone? Is that also subjective? Film or TV series that hit the mark for me nearly always get the tone right for the kind of story they're telling, and then sustain it. I tried watching Chuck, the TV series, for the first time the other night, but I'm not sure I'll watch it again because I couldn't settle to the tone, or perhaps it couldn't settle to itself. It wasn't quite spy spoof like Get Smart but it also wasn't quite 'serious' like Alias. It had funny dialogue but to me without the contrasting seriousness that makes it really enjoyable (something Joss Whedon does so well). And I don't think tone has to be too clearly obvious. For instance, I think Analyze This (or whatever the first one was called) got the tone right: not quite knockabout humour, not quite serious but confidently down the middle. In my writing old age, I'm more and more thinking that tone is everything.

Terry

Terry- again you're right: about tone.

There's some real juice in the concept of tone. Worth an extended piece. Pardoxically it both is and isn't subjective. It has to do with intention - in the case of a movie the aesthetic intention of the director. Notoriously films based on adapted screeplays often create a conflict between author and director and this is almost always down to a dispute about artistic intention of which tone is the expression.

Best parallel I guess might be normal speech. I used to teach and occasionally would have a bright but rebellious adolescent who would use perfectly respectful words but with an inescapably insolent tone. Irony and sarcasm are also grammatical exressions of this.

Visual tone is even harder to define. But you recognise it unmistakably when you see it. Often I think its caused by a director wanting to do too much and therefore falling between the two stools of unresolved artistic purpose.

Interesting topic. Be interested to hear other comments on it. Examples would be good.

regards

Z