The Kids Are All Right

Posted In: The Kids Are All Right

Joel Cardy says...

To ramp up the drama in this film, the director takes some very predictable and not very believable plot twists.I would have preferred she stay with the natural drama inherent in the very situation itself of a sperm donor finally meeting the children he sired for two lesbians almost two decades ago.The oldest child is set to go to college in a few weeks.Thus the stage is set for everyone to meet Mark Ruffalo as the donor.Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play the lesbian couple with Bening being a doctor and Moore the homemaker. Ruffalo owns a local restaurant.



Where it veers in the wrong direction is an attraction which flares up between the male donor and one of the lesbian women.Where it veers in the right direction is the inherent drama in finding out the missing link in your family's overall equation.It is a tension fraught situation for everyone wondering how he will change their family and whether Pandora's Box has been opened or not.



The film has a lot to say about nature vs. nurture.It drives one of the mothers crazy that she starts recognizing the children in his gestures and movements.The genetic stamp is there.Yet the donor is a real goof off in comparison to the family unit.The children have absorbed the advantages of having two highly educated and motivated mothers rearing them. They clearly do not have their father's attitude of "wasting his time by going to college."



The law has been changing rapidly with its being harder and harder to keep biological parenting information secret.We are clearly headed in the direction of most children knowing who and where biological parents are in almost every situation. Where this film is very good is in exploring the natural drama of what happens when a family has to start dealing with these issues now that the information is available.I wish the director had stuck to that natural drama rather than an unlikely attraction between Ruffalo and one of the women but that only takes one star off.It is very much a four star, very good film.

Posted on September 18, 2010

Maybell Bretl says...

I was digging everything about this movie, the two female leads and their kids are very believable as a family and I liked that. It was the plot twist, made to blow everything sky high, that really bothered me and my wife. We couldn't really believe what was happening and that really pissed the whole movie for us. I guess it says a lot about the actors' abilities that we almost couldn't even watch when the so called twist developed into something more, it felt a little too voyeuristic and it saddened the whole experience of the movie. So I guess it's a big 5 stars for the actors but the movie's contrivances really left little to be desired.

Posted on September 19, 2010

Irmgard Miears says...

"Blue, here is a shell for you

Inside you'll HEAR a sigh

A foggy lullaby

There is your song from me"

Joni Mitchell 'Blue'



There is a point in this film when one of the moms, Nic, starts singing Joni Mitchell's song 'Blue', and we learn that the daughter was named after this Joni.This is a particularly poignant moment because Nic, played by Annette Bening, is known as a strait laced, intelligent woman who shows little emotion. Jules, played by Julianne Moore is the heart of the moms.



Nic and Jules are two moms, married for twenty years and in the midst of some angst. They have two children, Joni and Laser, both have the same sperm donor but each of the moms gave birth to one of the children. Gay marriage has become so mainstream that this is a great take off of the difficulties marriages face. The issues arise when 15-year-old Laser, played by Josh Hutcherson, forces his 18-year-old sister Joni, played by Mia Wasikowska, to use her new legal standing to find out who their sperm donor father is. By the way Mia Wasikowska may be familiar to all from her role in HBO's 'In Treatment'. The dad turns out to be Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo, and a great dad he is. Free wheeling hippie on his way to growing up. He and the kids become attached, and he goes home to dinner to meet the moms. At first, Nic and Jules are stand offish, but Jules starts working for Paul and comes to understand more than she would like. The two teenagers are already in their own angst of growing up and facing independence.The stress and strain of the marriage causes upheaval, and we wonder will this,marriage survive.



The acting is superb, close to perfection, Bening and Moore play every little nuance to its core. Minimal make-up give the moms a true to life appearance. I could not, however, accept Bennings messy hairdo- it fit her character but not her. They are two intelligent women full of idealism and compromise. They both love their children and want the best, and the kids are nice and well adjusted.Mark Ruffalo plays the part of the casual agreeable fellow a little lost in his place. He is welcomed into a family and is a nice fit until it doesn't fit anymore.



Highly Recommended.prisrob 11-20-10



Love Affair



Savage Grace

Posted on September 19, 2010

Christiana Rollinger says...

Interesting to read all the reviews not only here on this space but in the media across the country raving about this film as being one of the best comedies of the year. After waiting until it came out on DVD, expecting something spectacular, this viewer found the film disappointing. Writer/Director Lisa Cholodenko and writer Stuart Blumberg did not use the book by the same name as their source for the story, but rather turned to Cholodenko's personal experience with the topic at hand and though it was many years in 'gestation', the movie was shot in an unprecedented 23 days. So much for background.



Nic (Annette Bening) is a hard working obsessive compulsive physician partnered with Jules (Julianne Moore), a free-floating, indecisive, career-frustrated landscape designer. The have two children - Joni (Mia Wasikowska) birthed by Nic and Laser (John Hutchenson) birthed by Jules - by the same sperm donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). There are the usual family tensions but the quartet seems fine until Joni and Laser decide they want to know their father. They uncover Paul who is into organic food delivery service and relate to him and he to them. When Nic and Jules discover the mission their kids have been on they feel their family has been disrupted. Further developments occur that drive the wedge between the moms close to dissolution but of course that is overcome by the coming together of Joni's leaving for college.



All this could be OK, but for this viewer the prejudices about same sex marriage are not championed but instead are placed in a negative light. Infidelity is just that and the problems don't stop there: offensive racial slurs occur when the embarrassed Jules fires gardener Luis (Joaqu

Posted on September 20, 2010

Frederick Shirk says...

In a world where nearly every story line and plot point feels like an obvious clich

Posted on September 21, 2010

Natosha Murton says...

The one star is for Annette B's lesbian portrayal, she was spot on and true;studied perfection.As for another "lesbian" flick slathered with dick, when oh when do we have to stop enduring this?? If you have seen one you've seen them all.Can't these pseudo lesbian films carry a warning?WARNING: "Sorry we must show hetero sex in our films in an endeavor to be fair to all the heterosexualswho are deprived of images that portray their lives,(and for all you lesbians we knew you secretly wanted it).We just want to tease you with minor lesbian content, big stars and make a lot of money off you and give nothing back."

Whatever message of diversity or happy family togetherness, and universal lesbian acceptance was in between, you lost me and I was raped of the price of admission.

Posted on September 21, 2010

Nevada Maatta says...

Lisa Cholodenko's new film tackles topics whose time has come. While the nation continues to roil with debate about gay marriage, countless same-sex couples have quietly entered into partnerships as durable as any heterosexual pairing, and many of these have produced children, either through adoption, or as in the case of Nic and Jules, the couple played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in "The Kids Are All Right," artificial insemination, each having a baby by the same sperm donor (how common is this, I wonder?). Touching on another modern familial trend, their teenaged children Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) have decided to seek out their biological father (Mark Ruffalo), who turns out to be Paul, an organic farmer and restaurateur whose casual attitude toward relationships is in sharp contrast to the committed family unit he has unknowingly aided in producing.



Whatever his flaws, Paul nevertheless has something that has been lacking in their lives, and the children and Jules, the less driven of the two women, soon warm to him. The perfectionist, overachieving Nic hangs back warily, threatened by what she sees as the unthinking eagerness of her loved ones to steer into deep emotional waters. It is one of the outstanding virtues of Cholodenko's film that the twists and turns these five people's lives take after their initial contact seem, with one important exception, entirely natural and inevitable. Much credit has to go to the script by Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg, so adept at catching the nuances of family life and friendship, particularly the way the strains of everyday existence and the routine of years together can chip away at genuine love to the point of collapse before anyone knows what has happened. This truth is beautifully limned in a moving climactic speech by Moore.



She is one of an altogether superb cast--Annette Bening's return to the screen is welcome and she plays Nic to absolute perfection (her silences are almost more eloquent than her words), while Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson are hardly less good as the children; Wasikowska in particular has a luminosity of a young Gwyneth Paltrow. That leaves Ruffalo, and though he has played the scruffy hunk role before, he does it very well, especially late in the film when he's conveying the bewilderment of a man who realizes, much too late, how far he is out of his depth.



***SPOILER ALERT***



So what's not to like? I suppose when it came to constructing the major plot crisis, it had to be the one Cholodenko and Blumberg chose. Only something that traumatic could have blown everyone's fragile happiness to smithereens, not to be put back together again except with agonizing care and no guarantee of success. Still, it's the one event that strikes a contrived note, and all the more disappointing because it plays into all of the sniggering stereotypes about a woman just needing the right man to show her the ropes. It seems churlish to complainwhen so much is right about "The Kids Are All Right," --but this flaw thereby seems the more glaring in comparison. Still, no one should be dissuaded from seeing this otherwise superb movie--there's too much great writing and acting in it, and food for thought long after it's over.

Posted on September 21, 2010

Shantae Siem says...

The Kids Are All Right is a thoroughly entertaining slice-of-life domestic drama about two kids who look up their sperm-donor father, causing cataclysmic changes in the family dynamic.Not a unique premise save that the parents of the kids happen to be lesbians.



The entire cause c

Posted on September 24, 2010

Jesse Suttin says...

The traditional family drama gets a provocative twist in this year's preeminent romantic dramedy The Kids Are All Right. Oscar nominees Julianne Moore and Annette Bening star as a gay married couple with two kids trying to battle the throes of their relationship when their kids decide to get curious about their biological father.









Jules and Nic (played by Moore and Bening, respectively) are slowly drifting into their own marriage hell when the lethal mix of emotional distance, Nic's dominance and Jules's submissiveness rear their ugly heads. Then their children Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) decide to seek out their Dad out of sheer curiosity during Joni's last month at home before she heads to college. The distance between their parents grows even further when the mere addition of the cool, motorcycle-riding dad Paul (played by Mark Ruffalo) threatens to disrupt their tight family unit. The impact Paul has on the family causes Nic to suspect that he may be causing her family to crumble like a stack of cards. But, like in any family drama. what doesn't kill them makes them stronger in the end.



Moore and Bening shine in this poignant film with Moore nailing her signature performance of a woman holding on to her last string of hope and Bening letting her fear of losing her family dictate her actions. Together the performances mark the perfect recipe in a beautifully written story is both funny in the most surprising parts and touching when it needs to be.

Posted on September 24, 2010

Winnie Carrozza says...

I love that this film is trying to normalize all the various families we have in the USA. After living overseas in two developing countries, this is the freedom I love about our country-so shame on those reviews that are just hating...go watch something else. I am so glad that they picked amazing actors, really did some thoughtful portrayals.



However, something that may seem small really bothered me and I felt like writing about it. Somehow, in the light of all the hating going on with LGTB, why is it ok to hate on the Latino gardener? He was treated horribly, and though Moore's character does mention it, it really wasn't ok with me. It felt like a class-issue, it felt horrible to think of my Latino family watching this portrayal, the vocal impersonations, all that-can we just stop that, please?



It also leads me to my final issue with why this movie wasn't a success to me. The kids-their voices were not heard, there wasn't much development and in the end, the title didn't work for me...It's ok, there were some important things...love that it wasn't violent and there were some sweet moments, but I was disappointed with it at the same time.

Posted on September 28, 2010