by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
I like to read reviews after I see movies. Mostly this is because I fear spoilers, but also because too many films have been ruined by badly pitched expectations (Napoleon Dynamite? Not funny, y’all). So when I stepped into a theater last weekend to see The Kids Are All Right, I had only the vaguest inkling of what I was getting myself into. One friend had liked it, another hadn’t; I knew that it was about lesbians and sperm donors, but mostly I wanted to see Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, and to see what all of the hype that I had been avoiding was about.
(Lots of spoilers after the jump)
I walked out of the theater with the same feelings that I usually have about “groundbreaking” romantic comedies – they never break as much ground as you want them to. The film was supposed to be revolutionary in two senses; it dealt with a lesbian couple in a romantic comedy, and two of its supporting characters were children conceived through reproductive technology. As far as I was concerned, it handled the first predictably (of course the lesbian couple’s relationship immediately begins to revolve around a heterosexual man) and the second inadequately, but I was grateful, at least, that both themes had appeared in a mainstream film. When it comes to Hollywood, I take progress where I can get it.
Reading Emily Rutherford’s review, though, inspired me to do some background research into what exactly reviewers were saying when the movie came out. And this was where the red flags began to appear. Like Emily’s review, which incisively took the film to task for its inability to “move beyond the phallic gaze which lingers around so many portrayals of lesbians in our culture,” they focused almost exclusively on the three adult protagonists, Nic (Annette Bening), Jules (Julianne Moore), and Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Much (virtual) ink has been spilled over Paul’s role in the film, and I leave you to explore the scads of commentary that has emerged on this topic. But what really interested me – and what seems to have escaped the attention of almost all of the film’s reviewers – are the two children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and the unfortunately-named Laser (Josh Hutcherson), both conceived using Paul’s sperm, but carried, respectively, by Nic and Jules.
Perhaps this is because I see a little of myself in Joni (and not just because she was named after Joni Mitchell and I was named after a Joni Mitchell song). Although I’m now a senior in college, I vividly remember that summer, only three years distant, between high school and college, full of anxious waiting and awkward parties and skirmishes with my parents. Wasikowska does an extraordinary job of projecting the profound unease that I felt at that age – uncomfortable in my body, I tried to pretend that I felt like an adult, and worried that everyone could see me failing. But on top of all of this late-adolescent angst, Joni has the added stress of the knowledge that, having just turned eighteen, she can unearth the identity of her biological father, which her brother finally convinces her to do.
This is where the film really disappoints. Given an opportunity to explore the tangled chaos of the way that our culture deals with families created through reproductive technologies, it focuses instead on the relationships between the adults (we do get to see more glamorized sex that way), and leaves the teenagers to be wise, funny, and ultimately half-baked supporting players. They vacillate between thinking that Paul is super-cool when he takes them for motorcycle rides, and feeling super-betrayed when he sleeps with Jules. Their insistence on connecting with Paul is never portrayed as more than curiosity, despite the fact that they know that it would devastate their mothers. But it does not seem to have occurred to the filmmakers that these issues might have haunted Joni and Laser since their childhood, nor do they take more than a feeble stab at wrestling with cultural scripts about reproductive technology.
In an article in Slate last month, researchers Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquandt detail their exploration of the families created via artificial insemination, and conclude that although adoption usually takes center stage, sperm donation raises troubling issues of its own. Donor offspring in their study, they write, “are suffering more than those who were adopted: hurting more, feeling more confused, and feeling more isolated from their families.”
I took issue with Clark and Marquandt’s article for a variety of reasons, mostly because I don’t agree with their conclusion that biological parents are the only “two people whose very beings are found in the child’s own body,” but one point is well taken: we just don’t know how to talk about families created by reproductive technologies, a problem that goes for homosexual and heterosexual couples alike. How do you explain to children, who are taught to ask where they came from, that test tubes may have been involved in their conception? Do you tell them that someone “helped” create them? And when do you start introducing this concept – when they’re two, or five, or ten? Do you make the sperm or egg donor part of your child’s life? And how do you explain their presence?
These are all questions that countless families are muddling through, by themselves, every day. And my generation is the first that will have to look them squarely in the face, because these technologies are still relatively new. Would it help to have more honest media depictions of the ways that families handle them? Hell yeah. Is The Kids Are All Right one of them? Not really. After meeting their father, Joni and Laser’s adjustment period is either non-existent or happens off-screen. Questions about Paul seem not to have disrupted their dinner-table conversations in the past. And when Nic slams the door in Paul’s face, saying, “This is not your family,” they seem to have no reaction except righteous anger at his interloping.
As I said before, my disappointment is measured with a certain amount of cynicism. These issues are incredibly challenging, and I don’t know if Hollywood is ready to deal with them with the depth and maturity that they require. Like Emily, I thought the film was watchable and enjoyable, but like many films that are the first of their kind, it lacks realism and sticking power. Leaving the theater, I was left with one simple conclusion: the kids are all right, because the movie’s really not about the kids.
