The Kids Are All Right starts with the premise that families composed of same-sex parents and their sperm-donor engendered kids are as normal as apple pie. Because writer-director Lisa Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg don’t feel the need to make overt “they’re-just-like-everybody-else” statements, they can jump right into their very absorbing story.
The two women, Nic (Annette Bening), a worry-wart doctor who lives on the fine line between being controlling and loving, and Jules (Julianne Moore), a would-be architect who has never quite found her calling in life, each became pregnant, three years apart, by sperm from the same donor. He turns out to be Paul (Mark Ruffalo), an organic gardener and restaurateur who back in the day needed 60 bucks, and decided that “giving sperm sounded better than giving blood.”
The children that the three adults have created are Joni (Mia Wasikowska), an 18-year-old who’s spending her final months at home before going to college, and the wonderfully named Laser (Josh Hutcherson), a 15-year-old semi-sensitive jock who gets the story rolling when he decides he wants to meet the source of his paternal DNA.
Paul, the sperm donor, is up for meeting his sort-of children. He’s a free spirit who seldom considers the consequences of his actions, so what does he have to lose? Plenty, it turns out, in this film that is hilarious and painful in equal measure.
The kids are drawn to Paul. He’s not as uptight as Nic, and he’s more together than Jules. When the women meet him, the uptight Nic dismisses him as being “full of himself,” which he is, while Jules is attracted by his charm, which Ruffalo supplies in spades.
The relationships develop from there, in ways that would sound predictable if this were a sex farce. The movie is in fact very funny, but the laughs come more from the honesty of the writing and acting than from the spicy plot developments. Then the laughs stop almost completely and the film becomes rather wrenching.
It’s hard to know whether to praise the writing, the direction, or the acting most. (Yes, it’s pretty much a perfect movie.) Bening takes the brittle rigidity she recently displayed in Mother and Child and for a time deploys it to comic effect. She locks into her character with just a twitch or two of her brow. Moore is quite appealing and moving, though in the comic sections of the film her character is not quite as precisely drawn as Bening’s.
The “kids” are fine. Wasikowska is moving as the “good girl” who both can’t wait to become an adult and Hutcherson nicely captures the inarticulate yearnings of a young man. Ruffalo may give the most charismatic and moving performance of all. His Paul is connected to the character Ruffalo played in his breakout performance: the good-hearted but ne’er do well brother in You Can Count on Me. Ruffalo understands the sufferings that come from always taking the easy way very well.
Actually, there’s no need to rank the performances competitively. The scenes that the three leads play together, with their subtle invitations and parries, are simply film acting at its finest.
