Nick (Annette Benning) has just discovered Jules (Julianne Moore) has been having sex regularly with Paul (Mark Ruffalo), one of many meal scenes from The Kids are All Right
Dear friends and readers,
This is warmly (natch) to recommend Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right as a film intelligent, moving, funny, exploring central issues of family life — albeit with reservations. It has had favorable reviews in the mainstream press, but also harshly criticized by GLBT, women critics (blogs, postings to listservs, the non-official comments), and snobs and homophobes. A lot of attention has been paid to it; when I recommended it to my hairdresser (a woman), she simply said she’d never go see it on the grounds it was lesbian, no matter what the film was like.
I understand the irritation GBLT people must feel watching it: we are introduced to two progressive minded, liberal and healthy food and wine drinking (the meals are all of the upper class organic gourmet food variety) older lesbian women, Nick (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore),
A relaxed moment
married for at least 18 years, with two children, each having given birth to one. Joni (Mia Wasikowska) resembles Benning, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson),
They are meeting Dad for the first time
who resembles Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the sperm donor whom Laser has pressured Joni into contacting before she goes off to college. She is now 18 and it seems has a right.
Paul is a super-successful restaurateur, semi-bohemian kind of guy, and grows his own organic food on a farm.
He accedes to meeting them, and the situation is set up.
I didn’t understand that. Can anyone explain how two women can have two children three years apart (Laser is three years younger than Joni) using the same sperm donor’s sperm? At dinner afterward Izzy said she has read of lesbian couples choosing one to have one baby and the other a second. But the sperm donor for both in such a distance of time puzzles me.
Why the irritation: Paul with ease seems to be not just accepted but preferred at first, and he offers relaxed easy wisdom, intensely anti-intellectual, not phony. It’s important that he has a penis as somehow that is part of what gives him his gravitas. It’s not thoughtless decision that gave him a beard too. What the two women can’t have. And a liaison ensues between Jules and Paul. As the movie moves on we see many years of resentful irritation, the kind many married couples have when one is successful and makes the money (that’s Nick, a doctor) and the other isn’t and doesn’t (that’s Jules, who has a degree as an architect but stayed home with the kids), but emphasis is on his tool and its irresistibility.
with his black girlfriend, Tanya (Yaya DaCosta).
In the scenes between him and Jules, she is hungry for straight fucks.
I have also read excoriating accounts by women on the assumption in the film that one must have, wants children and that we all want and live in this family life setting that resembles nothing so much as the setting of Father Knows Best with Nick as the irritating well-meaning naturally father. No one here has any money problems; the house is a beautiful spic-and-span respectable version of the 1950s house the famous situation comedy focused on; Nick’s salary as a physician (remember Robert Young also played the exemplary Marcus Welby, MD) will bring Joni a upscale college education (the place we leave her at resembled Sweet Briar, an expensive private college in middle Virginia), includes a big station-wagon kind of car. And Nick is a father-type who in a way does know best and means very well, even if she is tactless, uncomfortable, frets over everyone’s safety, and loses her temper. I loved Benning (this is one of the best roles I’ve ever seen her in), recognized aspects of myself in her. People complained she was photographed to look old. People get old. She is old. Her arms are not sticks like young actresses (only Tanya verges on the anorexic in this film).
It’s not a screwball comedy which the trailer tries to suggest; it’s a sentimental near-weeping kind of romantic comedy. Rather like The Object of My Affection, it exemplifies central normative values of American life. Here are our Moms reaching out to the kids for hugs:
The kids are made the center of the women’s existence; what matter is the kids are all right (a Who song), not whether the adults are — though of course this being a normative movie, our heroines, while a little flakey (Jules) and prone to use male sex videos while having sex under the blankets (Nick is clearly the dominant one), are thriving, all is fundamentally “right” in this world. Someone on face book commented how many people don’t realize child-rearing is an experiment and the kids survive, to which I replied the adults need to survive too, they too have corrosive memories (see comments).
What the film did was explore and within the limits of popular entertainment enact hard issues. During the course of the film, Jules begins to go to bed regularly with Paul. Jules has never made a career for herself, got a degree in architecture and has run a couple of (apparently) failed businesses, and now is into Landscape Design (funded by Nick who points out Jules bought a truck before having any client basis); in one of their quarrels Nick says she is the support of the family, to which Jules says she wants it this way, she wanted Jules to stay home with the kids. Paul (who also has plenty of money — he didn’t need a college degree to do well in life) hires her to fix the garden outside his house and business. So they meet in the afternoons (and Chloe in the Afternoon farce-style begins). At the close of the movie when Jules apologizes to Nick and the children she stresses how hard it is to be married for many years, the emotional pain and ennui, how she has felt inferior, but also how she can’t explain why she did what she did (had sex with Paul which in the film is regarded as a terrible thing by all but the poor hired gardener, Luis (Joaquin Garrado) who is fired for being there, and seeing what’s going on.
Luis is in fact one of the minor people in the film who are not forgiven at the end, not brought back into the fold. He did not deserve to be fired. He increased Jules’s guilt by being in the garden hard at work and needing direction just when she and Paul were having it off in bed. He knows they are and smiles at them. She accuses him of smiling — for which he is fired.
For me painful was the happy ending, it made me come near tears — but then the film (as I say) was partly rooted in real life. Everyone you see stays together. The (unworthy or undeserving or badly behaved or just plain lonely and ill advised) interloper, Paul, is (and we are relieved) put off (so to speak). Paul thought that Jules would leave Nick for him; he began to believe the kids would come and live with him. Jules is startled to see this, and when he comes to apologize, he receives a summary rejection by Nick and the door is shut on his face. Our all-American son and daughter are shocked and turned off by him at last.
The concluding scene gives us all four cooperating to set Joni’s room up at her college. Joni kicks them out to assert her independence, but they don’t go off until they get the say-so (don’t you trust us, asks Jules). A final moving hug of the crying two Moms and Joni and Paul and Moms get back in the car to drive home. On the way back, Laser tells his Moms he thinks they should stay together because they are too old and gradually Jules sticks out her hand over the gear box and Nick squeezes it tight.
The truth is family life is not supported for real by loyalty by everyone: people abandon one another, they desert, and they are not sorry they did this. Not in the least. To make it clear I can be included in this after all I left my first husband and at 18 the only explanation I had was “the spell is over.” It’s not just all I could think to say, it was the explanation. But people also leave not after a short time, but after 18 years and more. I loved the apology scenes (especially by Julianne Moore when she turns the TV off at last) but apologies are often rituals (as I wrote about counterrevolutionaries) and just paper over things. And many people do not apologize since they are not sorry.
Everyone in this film but Clay (Eddie Hassell) is a good person, susceptible to training in sociological decency. Clay is Laser’s friend who Nick disapproves of but uses the pseudo-language of upper liberal middle class life to criticize (Clay is not helping Laser to develop), whom Paul immediately (natch) recognizes as no-good, to be excluded. When Clay grabs a dog, and starts to pull down his pants to piss on the poor creature, Laser finally sees he’s shit. I wish though the movie had conceded how there are not only bad people in the world, but bad kids, without resorting to the exaggeration of a film like The Bad Seed (which makes itself unreal by making the child-girl a monster of evil).
Jim denied it was really a pro-lesbian or gay film and said as yet films do not show gay or lesbian or bisexual people are simply there because people are. They always are there to make a point. Tanya is there to show Paul is unconventional. This is a film asserting Lesbians are just like everyone else, indeed use male videos, have a father, bring up heterosexual children. Family trumps all here — tellingly all the friends of Joni and Laser are a little suspicious. Joni’s girlfriend is shallowly pushing her to have sex before she’s ready; this reminded me of Madame de Genlis (a conservative 18th century educator) asserting her daughter must cling to, confide in mom first. I remember when I was in sleep-away camp at age 7, I made a girlfriend who I was congenial with and for 2 days we were happy together; then she told me her parents said she must stay with her cousin, make her cousin her best friend, as family (biology, tribes) matter far more than personal relationships. So she had nothing to do with me for the rest of the summer.
It’s rather a woman’s film (a woman wrote the script — with Stuart Blumberg), directed it, was on the producing team. The major stars are two women. It has so many of the motifs and structures of women’s art: so many scenes of the women and children and sometimes sperm donor sitting around the table.
Scenes of friendship and doing daily things. An emphasis on the cyclical nature of life.
Morning again, time to go to work
Though again we are confronted by the ritual humiliation of the woman character. After all, it is Jules who plays the woman in this marriage who almost destroys it by having sex with Paul; Jules who must apologize and beg for forgiveness. At the same time to be fair (and explain why I so enjoyed the film), as Jules Julianne Moore holds the family together for real. Her loving interventions, her continual kindnesses and urging of everyone to get along; the way she goes over to Joni and Laser after Nick makes it clear she has gone to bed with Paul — the film values someone intensely who has no career, makes no money. It’s she who has to sleep downstairs when Nick throws her out of their bed, and she holds no grudges. I’ve usually liked the characters Julianne Moore plays and this film showed the best sides of her typology. Not abject, giving and then appreciated.
What saves this film are the nuances of the individual scenes and dialogue — script, acting, the perfect timing, and discordant moments. Especially the ongoing little jarring comments by Jules and Nick at and to one another. Jules reminds Nick that she has drunk too much. Nick cuts across Jules’s super-kindness to the kids (Jules is the woman reconciling everyone) to insist on making choices based on remembering harder dangers: riding on motorcycles the way Paul loves to is dangerous, statistically you are courting death or crippling, so she works hard to prevent Joni and Paul from doing it.
This seems to be a summer for well-done (for this film is excellently done) women’s films which at least point to (this film points) or deeply confront (Please Give, Winter’s Bone, Joan Rivers: A piece of Work) the inexorableness of hard and unpleasant realities in their perception of life.
Ellen
P.S. 3/5/13:
The latest issue of WRof B is out and makes me ashamed of myself. I see I missed totally the undergirding falsifying nature, the danger of the patriarchal pattern of _The Kids are All Right_. I did see it the patriarchy in the presentation of Annette Bening, but I breezed over it to expose the class biases of the film. A book reviewed in the WRofB questions the lurch to marriage in present heterosexual terms that is attributed as a desire by all too generally for the LGBT community: Nicola Barker’s Not the Marrying Kind.
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I got involved in the following conversation on facebook with an old friend:
I had written:
The Kids Are All Right. An intelligent moving film. Thanks RJ [who recommended it]. It’d irritate GBLT people; the enactment of idea all must, want children, family life is supported for real by loyalty painful to see enacted but this is the way movies explore hard issues. I loved Benning, recognized myself. Don’t miss it. Ellen. Windows opened this morning again. Whew.
Mike replied:
Yes, I get what you are saying, there are many factors outside the home that impact child development. But I think my point stands. We do what we think is right. “What we think is right” often is, not right. But, more often than not (wa…y more often), at the end of the process, the kids are functioning competently as adults.
One of my favorite movie scenes is in “Parenthood.” The teenaged beau of one of the main characters’ daughter tells his girlfriend’s mother about his abusive father, who used to get his sons out of bed in the morning by flipping burning cigarette butts at them. “You know,” he says, “you have to have a licence to drive a car and you have to have a licence for a dog; but any buttfucking idiot can be a father.” Indeed.
On which I rejoined:
First, I object to the idea there is right conduct and the idea of thinking about it that way. Some situations preclude doing the right thing, or it’s useless.
Second, your focus… on the kids. Rarely do we see stories of how children hurt and betray parents; sometimes when the Ps are aged (Susan Hill has a story of a woman who blessedly escapes her daughter when she goes into a home — it’s much kinder), but it happens much much earlier and as frequently. Trollope does give us this perspective equally — Mr Scarborough’s Family is one novel. Ellen.
Sperm can be frozen. That’s how people can have multiple children by the same donor, years apart. They do it on purpose so the children will be biological siblings.
I can more or less understand Jim’s comment that gay people are there to make a point rather than just because they’re there–as non-gay people are. I’m not sure if this is why the GLBT folks disliked it. I would also agree that it does not sound to be pro-lesbian or pro-gay. Perhaps, it just makes too much of an issue of their sexual preferences.
Linda
IN response to Diana, it’s telling that there is an underlying notion here biological ties will reinforce the sociological. I didn’t know people can and do freeze one person’s sperm to make biological ties. Ellen
Linda, I don’ t think it is pro-GBLT. It wants to erase everything that makes such a couple distinct from heterosexual and even there it shows them in bed in a way that makes them resemble heterosexual people. Not that they don’t. From the film one would wonder why the fuss? Why would my (usually good-natured) hairdresser simply refuse to go? Ellen
More from Mike:
“One of the plot lines in “Parenthood” involves the callous manipulation of the father by his sociopathic son. It is a brutal counterpoint to the other, more sentimental line.”
I’ve not seen _Parenthood_. Maybe I should put it on my Netflix queu. Did you click on
that explains what I was referring to yesterday. The movie does emphasize the adults’ lives more than the children’s in that a breakup of these two adult women would be devastating for these two young adults.
I wish I could believe these bad people are sociopaths. There are just too many of them and they are too accepted to put them outside a norm.
Ellen
I saw The Kids Are All Right this weekend, and while I enjoyed the performances very much, especially Julianne Moore, Annette Bening and Mia Wasikowska’s, I was offended by the so-called lesbian sex scene at the beginning of the movie with Julianne under the covers and Annette watching male gay porn. There were many things in the movie to offend me as a member of the GLBT tribe, other things I found to be classist, racist, and not funny period. But Ellen, your blog is insightful, thoughtful and I’m so glad to read it this morning. Thank you for writing it.
I know I laughed aloud several times, partly because in a couple of cases I was the only one laughing. (This happened when I saw Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work.) I can’t recall exactly but feel I enjoyed some of Julianne Moore’s antics _vis-a-via_ her relationship with Annette Benning; I had not realized what a good comic actress she is. She has wonderful timing, can be very droll. I don’t know much about lesbian sex, only thought that when the two hugged there was something mannish about the way Benning hugged Moore. Ellen
I wanted to like this film, but in the end, the class issues really over-rode the gender issues for me. I liked that a relatively healthy family was the given here. Clearly the two kids have been raised well and happily, as the children of my lesbian couple friends are. I thought the acting was great all around, and if most of the moves were predictable, at least they weren’t the angst-ridden moves that all gay characters had to enact for so many previous films.
However, the way in which Paul and Luis are treated seems bad and approved by the characters and the director. Is it because they are men? Neither seems insensitive, both are taken advantage of. If Paul crossed a line, surely Jules crossed it with him, but she is welcomed back into the fold, and he is left out in the cold–or at least the dark, this being sunny California, while his biological son shuns him.
Could there be a class issue here? Paul is successful but he (gasp) does not have a college education, which Nic makes fun of privately. But then, Nic dislikes Paul previously, without ever meeting him and unless she is not a man hater, why? (I do not think she is a man hater. I think she is an upper class snob.) The only reason Nic associates with Paul at all is to show the family that she can, one more notch in her liberal belt, and the only way she can do that is to monopolize the dinner, thus her painfully long rendition of the Joni Mitchell song which he likes, though he, like we, would probably rather hear Joni sing it than Nic.
So the family is the same happy family unit at the end, but they have royally screwed (literally) one person and been very not nice to another in economic ways that the man can ill afford, I imagine.
On my ride home, I wasn’t so happy thinking about this famiy as they were thinking about themselves on their ride home, or as I was in the few warm moments as I sat in the theater. Maybe I think too much.
Offblog I’ve been told about one case of freezing of sperm from a donor to make biologically related children which is uncannily like that in the film. Someone else said it’s extremely unlikely (ridiculous) a donor and one of the parents in later years would have an affair; one of the couple and another woman might be plausible.
I know of a case where a gay man and his partner tried to adopt for years and finally gave up and hired a surrogate who had twins.
The film seems to have grated on people precisely because it reached out to what makes people troubled or ostracized but then did not present the issues accurately but rather slid over or reinforced bad stereotypes. I came near crying because the ending seemed to deny what has been a wrenching experience for me in the last two years: that a very close relative who I thought loved me and whom I tried to love and do all I could for and knew I was spending huge amounts every time I saw this adult (a kind of bribe I knew) who then just dropped us permanently right around the time it became obvious I couldn’t keep spending at that rate, after hurting us with needling berating bullying ways and now the person seems not to care at all or hate precisely where the person has attacked and used us the most.
And there’s nothing to be done. No use to try to mend or reconcile because if I do that I’ll only get mean condescension and more cruel comments and ways.
Happy endings are often cruel when meretricious.
Still lesbians were not treated as monsters in the way they were in the 1961 Children’s Hour — on WWTTA we read Hellman’s play 2 springs ago now and a couple of us saw that dismaying film which at that time (1960) was seen as broad-minded :).
Ellen
From Fran:
“I’m afraid I’m with Linda on this one. Admittedly it’s quite a while since I saw it, or rather some of it, as I couldn’t watch it to the end: I found myself out of sympathy with both plot and characters and its director seemed uncertain of what tone to hit. I’ve also never particularly appreciated its main actors either. Maybe Anniston is an American thing:)
See:
Thanks for the heads up on the Cholodenko film, though, Ellen. I think we’ve talked about a couple of her films before. I found ‘High Art’ particularly memorable, especially because of the Ally Sheedy, Radha Mitchell and Patricia Clarkson’s acting.
Since you’ve been watching Fassbinder lately and although it’s very much a woman-driven film, I thought I’d also mention that the drug-ridden, arty and ultimately unhealthily interdependent clique at its centre is very reminiscent of the group he’d gathered around himself in Berlin. It’s no coincidence that its most dysfunctional and destructive character, the one played by Clarkson, is a former actress in some of his films.
Fran”
Thank you for your comments, Fran, always appreciated. For me “The Object of My Affection” was not an Anniston film, but a Paul Rudd one. Rudd played Mr Knightley in the Clueless film and I’m a real Mr Knightley lover — I like to imagine him combined with Henry Tilney as the perfect male companion for life. I also loved Nigel Hawthorne, an inimitable Archbishop Grantley in the 1984 Barchester Chronicles; I still hear his retort to Mr Harding when Mr Harding refused the beautifully-paid and housed sinecure on the grounds it was 1) a corrupt patronage offering; and 2) he didn’t think he could fulfill the duties.
What Duties? thundered Hawthorne.
I also loved the dancing and music — so Wasserstein won me over by the music that I was at first tone-deaf to in her plays.
Finally for me the theme that counted was the danger of entanglement, of any falling in love, its risks outweighing any benefits. I ignored the ending as Lean tells us to.
I was far more offended or irritated by The Kids are All Right. As someone on the blog comments points out what an upper class snobbish fantasy this was. No one in Object of My Affection as the big income, fancy car and ease with paying private college educations.
Also the happy ending was central to The Kids are All right, not tacked on.
I’m interested to hear the comments on Effi Brest. I had trouble on a literal level following it. I put it down to not having read the book. Now I see the movie (as so many) has the book partly as a pretext. Since I know so little about German culture, particularly individual elites, no wonder I was puzzled at what was happening and why!
Ellen 🙂
Splendidly thought-out essay on your blog, Ellen, and much to agree with. I just saw the movie (which I also recommend), and am trying to pin down why it haunts me (aside from the splendid scene when the TV is shut off for the apology)–I think it’s because it’s a classically human film, in which no main character is perfect, but each is tranformed in significant ways by the end of the film. (The exception being, as you noted, the appealing and unfortunately fired garden worker who recognizes what’s happening upstairs in the bedroom and who is fired out of Jules’ guilt/embarrassment.) Bennign is splendid, and the transformations are a source of pleasure to the viewer (at least to this viewer!), and a significant change from many other summer movies in which characters often are all good or bad, and who remain so to the end . . . worth going to, IMHO.
Judy Montgomery
I thought Paul (Mark Ruffalo) was treated unfair and the family just kind of writes him off out of their lives. They brang him into their lives and after he meets them and gets to know them he is giving a glimpse at what it would be like to have a family: he is enamoured by the kids so he starts spending more time with them. I just felt they shouldn’t of been so quick to kick Paul out of their lives, Paul of course shouldn’t of expected Jules and the kids to come be with him but I felt that he should of been able to stay involved with the kids as a friend/biological father.
“Brang” ain’t a word, James…
Comparing Blue is the Warmest Color:
People have been rightly saying Blue is disguised male porn:
While I did not review The Kids are All Right favorably as I felt 1) it was strongly classist and 2) it normalized the lesbian relationship in a way that turned the two women into the father and mother figure and showed us once again that “father” (Annette Bening ) knows best and also did not convey that the emotional configuration is different:
nonetheless, the sex between the two women was not presented exploitatively. I half-remember it was complained about as not there enough, and do remember the two women had sex under the covers, the film is not disguised male porn.
Ellen