“The Kids Are All Right” Is Much More Than An All Right Movie

Sleep Sunshine; hard at work at the Ragdale House

By: Sleep Sunshine
Judging by the box office (and one should, never ever ever, judge by the box office), Lisa Cholodenko‘s alt. family drama, The Kids Are All Right, is irrelevant in the face of Inception‘s nearly 143 million dollar box office accumulation.  In four weeks of release (one more than Inception), the movie has only generated 5 million dollars.

Luckily, there isn’t a popularity/quality correlation.

For in terms of quality, The Kids Are All Right is unquantifiable.

High Art (1998)

Laurel Canyon (2002)

Unlike Ms. Cholodenko’s more risque films, High Art (1998) and the ravingly reviewed Laurel Canyon (2002), Kids is standard family drama, focusing on the difficulties of marriage and raising children.

Well, it is a family drama; except for the facts…

• the featured married couple is a pair of lesbians,
• and the conflict surrounds their two children contacting and building a relationship with their sperm donor.

Yet, the portrayal of an American family that many Americans would still consider alternative, unconventional or even down-right immoral in such an unapologetic, seamless fashion allows viewers a rare behind-the-scenes vantage into the growth and development in the ideal of the institution of family itself.

Mainly, that gay marriages, like straight marriages, are really, really hard.

Bening and Moore as Nic and Jules

The title couple of Nic and Jules, played wonderfully by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, find themselves in a valley point in their marriage, where after being married-to someone for such a long time, as Jules says, “You no longer see them.”

The couple is “opposites-attract” personified.  Bening captures Nic’s Type-A personality expertly, as well as it’s detrimental affect on both her wife and their two kids–Joni, eighteen, and Laser, fifteen.  Moore embodies Jules’s bohemian aura in such a way you know the couple is in for a crash, though you’re not sure exactly where it’ll come from.

Laser and Joni meet the Sperm Donor (Paul)

The primary conflict involves Laser’s desire to find his “father” (as Nic points out, several times, “what, you mean the Sperm Donor?”) and how through Joni and Laser wrestling with their developing identities aided by interaction with their “father” (Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo) forces their “moms” to grapple with their own identities, as mothers, wives, and lesbians.

Equally, Paul finds himself on unfamiliar ground.  A successful Los Angles restauranteur and co-op farmer, Paul is startled to discover a decision he’d made at nineteen to donate sperm (because “it seemed less painful than blood”) had ramifications he’d never considered.  So when he meets his two “children,” they change him and his life in a way he’d never imagined.

This would be the only area of weakness I discovered in the movie, having to do not with the expert directing of Ms. Cholodenko nor of the realistic portrayals of all actors involved, but solely due to the limited scope capable in an hour and a half film.  The movie could have been shot from Paul’s point of view and found ample fodder for intellectual digestion.

But the story Ms. Cholodenko and desired to tell was of Nic and Jules, and to her credit she never wavers from this.  Though I felt a bit cheated at the end that Paul’s character arc wasn’t equally developed, I was reminded of the fact that it was Nic and Jules’s movie and found myself at the end of an hour and forty-four minutes, equally satisfied and hungry.

For the skill and daftness Ms. Cholodenko crafts her story arc is both expert and creative.  For example, the scene encapsulating the climax of the movie (specifics, of which, I will not give-away here) is prepped, paced, and executed tone-perfect and in-tune with character, you, as the audience, literally forget you’re watching a movie and believe you’re peeking into the window of a neighbor’s house during a family dinner.

Except Nic and Jules aren’t most of our neighbors.  At least not in 2010, in most communities in the country, and this makes The Kids Are All Right even that much more gripping and interesting.  The audience is thrust into a foreign world, so seamlessly and painlessly, that story’s “unconventional” idiosyncrasies (ie–Nic and Jules are lesbians, Paul is a Sperm Donor, Joni and Laser were conceived from artificial insemination) disappear and all you’re left with is a mirror to examine the inherent difficulties of your marriage and relationship to your kids and how life and interpersonal relationships in life are really, really hard.

Because in the end what a great movie does is convince you that the characters on the screen could really live somewhere in Los Angeles (in this case) and could really be going through and dealing with the presented conflicts.  In the end, through specific characters living specific lives, great movies convince us, again and again, of this simple fact:

We’re all just people.

Don’t let the box office numbers convince you otherwise; The Kids Are All Right is very relevant.

–SS

There are Mysteries in Pittsburgh

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (2008)

By: Michael James Greenwald

Turns out there’s a lot going on in Pittsburgh…who knew.  Turns out, as well, I’m a little late to the party…well, everyone knew that.

On Thursday night I took a screenwriting class at Story Studio Chicago and the Chicago screenwriter and teacher, Danny Kravitz (not Lenny’s brother) mentioned he’d reviewed The Mysteries of Pittsburgh late the other night on Showtime.  I’d heard of the the best-selling book by Michael Chabon, but had never seen the film adaptation.  Boy, was I missing out.

Starring the marvelously chameleon-like Peter Sarsgaard, gorgeous and complicated Sienna Miller, and Nick Nolte playing tough like not many actors can, the movie chronicles one summer in the life of the recently graduated, Art Bechstein (played deliciously wide-eyed by Jon Foster), who has three months to do what he wants before beginning his straight-laced life at a top Pittsburgh investment house, a position his mobbed-up father (Nolte) strong-armed for him.  Bechstein gets a job as a bookstore clerk, begins banging his boss, and in one drug-fueled night out meets the catalyst who will change his life.

Coming of age stories have formulas, and this movie, and the book (which Chabon wrote as an undergraduate at the University of Pittsburgh and submitted as his MFA thesis at UC Irvine), I assume, though I’m currently working on Chabon’s Wonderboys and haven’t gotten to it yet, follows the formula quite closely, but somehow this is not disappointing.  I think this has to do with the richness of the characters, especially Sarsgaard’s Cleveland and Nolte’s Poppa Dick, and the beauty with which the story of a summer in the life of three people who deeply love one another is told.

I’ve often heard that great stories are told like icebergs, where the peak of the berg is easily visible above the water, but the greater portion of the thing exists below the surface of the water.  The friendship triangle between Jane, Cleveland and Art is the focal point of most of the movie, but the viewer feels, from the second Art meets Jane and when Art discovers Cleveland’s bi-sexuality, there is something more intimate lying below the water’s surface between these three.  The brilliance of Rawsom Marshall Thurber’s writing and directing, though, is found in his restraint in rushing the sexual aspect of their connection, and even though you, as a viewer, know it’s inevitable that two or all three are going to succumb at some point, watching the strength of their bond develop is so captivating, at the end of the movie you’re left with the residuals of the power of friendship more than anything.

For me, great movies leave me with a sense of hope that such magic, of love or friendship or family or community, can be found in the real world.  Sitting in my comfy chair, watching the credits of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh roll, I felt that exact feeling.