Movie Review: The Kids Are All Right

By Emily Rutherford

Spoiler Alert

Watching the trailer for Lisa Cholodenko’s movie The Kids Are All Right, you could be excused for thinking that you were getting a lesbian movie. The trailer does, after all, advertise a family headed by two women, Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore), who conceived their children via sperm donation—and what portrayal of lesbian-headed families in the media doesn’t feature some sort of plot point about sperm? Much of the commentary on this movie has centered around various points to do with Nic’s and Jules’ lesbian-ness, whether analyzing the authenticity of Bening’s and Moore’s portrayal of a married couple, or trying to puzzle through a scene in which the couple has sex while watching gay male porn. Relatively few of the reviews I looked at before I saw the film devoted much attention to Mark Ruffalo’s role as sperm donor Paul, and so I expected to see a movie about the modern middle-class American family which is also a lesbian movie, exploring the female leads’ relationships to their children and to each other.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This is not a movie about Nic, Jules, daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and son Laser (Josh Hutcherson); it’s a movie about Paul and his relationship to women. While Laser, a two-dimensional teenage-boy archetype, tends to fade into the background, the film dwells on Joni’s initially awkward but increasingly filial relationship to Paul; Nic’s nearly invariably hostile relationship to Paul; and Jules’ far more complicated relationship to Paul, which morphs into an affair as the suddenly-present father figure for her children promises to give Jules the affection and validation her spouse has grown too distant to provide. The audience is hammered over the head with evidence of Paul’s virility: he has passionate sex with various beautiful women who move through his life; he has passionate sex with a lesbian woman; and, of course, his entire presence in the film is justified by the fact that his sperm is responsible for the existence of two of its main characters. The rules of Hollywood, which help to dictate that the gay sex scenes will be awkward, dull, and obscured by bedclothes in contrast to the lusciously graphic straight sex scenes only underscore the already-obvious heterosexuality of this movie. (As one review asked, “How do heterosexuals keep from getting concussions from smacking into the walls and furniture? Should heterosexual adolescents be counseled to wear helmets during sex?”)

This is not really a movie about lesbians, for it is not a movie about women. Rather, it is a movie about one straight man and his interactions with a variety of women, two of whom are lesbians and one of whom the narrative has him bed anyway. It seems as if it is not yet possible for mainstream cinema to move beyond the phallic gaze which lingers around so many portrayals of lesbians in our culture. When Laser asks his moms why they watch gay male porn, they reply that, as we know, most ostensibly “lesbian” porn is produced with straight men in mind—but their own movie is a story of straight male privilege as well, in which the film’s very masculine straight man is allowed to take control of 104 minutes of narrative and screen time.

However, as a friend point out to me, Paul’s control over the narrative is not absolute, and nor is his control over the viewer. The fact that I cringed all through the scenes depicting Jules’ and Paul’s affair (which is quite a lot of the movie, really) demonstrates that the effect of the heterocentric narrative is actually to make the viewer uncomfortable, and it’s possible that the profound awkwardness of these scenes, and also the profound pity that we feel for Nic when she finds out about her partner’s infidelity, were intended precisely to remind the viewer that a rocky marriage, an affair, and the complicated emotions which go along with them are issues which carry powerful feelings and moral connotations, regardless of the sexual orientations of the characters in question. Moreover, although the film raises the interpretive possibility that Jules is having an affair with a man because somewhat-butch Nic isn’t masculine enough to resolve the anxieties of a heterosexist and homophobic culture, that possibility is dismissed by the end, when  Paul is quite firmly dismissed as “donor,” not “father,” and the two parents are sufficiently reconciled to drive eight hours together to drop their eldest child off for her first semester of college. The family which waves goodbye to Joni at a campus looking a little bit like Stanford’s (it’s hard to tell) does not need a husband or father, and it’s quite clear that Joni, at least, has turned into a capable young woman without one.

The Kids Are All Right is a watchable and at times quite entertaining movie. The dialogue is alternately touching and hilarious; while Jules is an awkward and weird character with whom I had difficulty sympathizing, she is nevertheless compelling, and Nic and Joni are both people I’ve known at some point in my life, and perhaps resembled a bit myself. Wasikowski’s portrayal of Joni, in particular, is complex and authentic, my favorite movie teenager in recent memory. And yet all three strong women must act in the shadow of Mark Ruffalo, while the audience is made to feel as if his assholishly bumbling character is somehow necessary to complement the more subtly human foibles of a very quintessentially middle-class American family. My desire to see a movie about lesbians, or even a movie where the protagonists are all women, is still unfulfilled: I can only hope that American cinema will eventually determine that it doesn’t need a straight man to make a good movie.