The Kids Are All Right.

The more I think about The Kids Are All Right (currently $6.59 on amazon), a 2010 comedy nominated for Best Picture with every other movie made in Hollywood last year, the more frustrating I find it. It is extremely well-acted, with as many as five strong performances depending on your standards for younger actors, and deliberately uncomfortable almost from the first line of dialogue. Its exploration of the nature of complex long-term relationships by using one we might (wrongly) consider “unusual” and making it look as usual as it should be is insightful and unflinching. And then the whole thing falls flat in the final ten minutes, as if the writers just ran out of steam – or were encouraged to deliver a more traditional ending.

Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) Allgood are a married lesbian couple who have raised two children, 18-year-old Joni and 15-year-old (I think) Laser, each borne by a different mother but from sperm from the same anonymous donor. Laser pushes Joni to call the sperm bank and request to contact the donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a modern-hippie restaurateur who becomes involved in the kids’ lives, much to the chagrin of Nic. Jules, meanwhile, is trying to get a landscape design business for which she seems fairly unqualified off the ground, and agrees to take on Paul as her first client, only to – mild spoiler here – end up sleeping with him. (The scene where they first have sex includes a hilarious nod to the scene in Boogie Nights where Moore’s character first sees Dirk Diggler’s jiggler.) The consequences of that act, while fairly predictable, aren’t fully played out at the end of the film, particularly not for Paul, whose storyline was cut off without a fraction of resolution, a shame for a character that was both central and well-developed, flawed yet sympathetic, often the lens through which we see the Allgoods more clearly.

At first blush, I took the film to be a meditation on the nature of families and how delicate the balance can be even in what otherwise appears to be an emotionally strong family; the fact that the parents are gay is only relevant in that it allows for the sperm-donor plot line, as otherwise the Allgoods are a standard nuclear family. But now I’m wondering if the film is really about Nic, and how destructive her own controlling personality is on her family, especially on Jules and Laser. She crosses the line into overinvolvement in some of her interrogations of her kids (and the third degree she later gives Paul). She uses Jules’ and Paul’s affair as a weapon to drive wedges between Jules and the kids as well as between Paul and the kids, and to reestablish her dominance in her relationship with Jules. In the dinner scene at Paul’s house, she brings the entire conversation to a halt with a seemingly innocent move that is designed to get all eyes on her. Even before the final blowout with Jules, their arguments revolve around her dissatisfaction – and if Jules tries to get a word in about her own complaints, Nic manages to refocus the argument about herself. She might be a narcissist, but even if not she clearly has a driving need to control everything she can in her life, even if that means detracting from the lives of those closest to her.

Bening is off the charts in her performance as Nic – what a year for actresses in starring roles – infusing nearly every scene, even light ones, with the tension that defines her tightly-wound character. Moore was also excellent in her typical up-for-anything role, but I thought Bening’s task was tougher, as Nic is written with strong masculine and feminine sides; she’s the head of household, breadwinner, decision-maker, with boyishly short hair, yet wears makeup (Jules doesn’t), shows more outward emotion, takes more care of her overall appearance … perhaps the character is just overwhelmed by the extent of the role she expects or is expected to fill, and just when she has the balance right, in comes Paul to upset everything. This conflict makes it all the more unsatisfying when the storyline ends so abruptly. A clean, complete resolution would be unrealistic, but there’s an “everything’s going to be fine” vibe to the closing scenes that I didn’t think was set up by anything that came before it.

Ruffalo was affecting in an understated role as the soft-spoken, warm-hearted Paul, living a twenty-year-old’s dream life only to realize through his discovery of an instant family that he doesn’t have the life he really wants. The script easily could have left him as simply a vehicle to expose the fragile structure holding the Allgood family together, but instead he was a fully-formed character who establishes different relationships with each of the four family members. Laser ended up with the least development – although he has one of the better lines when his mothers catch him and a friend watching an adult DVD, a scene that is about as awkward (in a good way) as any realistic movie can get – and his relationship with Paul is also underexplored, especially since he was the one who originally pushed his sister to call the sperm bank.

I can watch and appreciate a tough, complex, uncomfortable movie if there’s a decent payoff at the end – again, not necessarily a clear dénouement wrapped up in a bow, but one where the protagonists are, if not better off, at least materially changed because of the conclusion of the episode they’ve just experienced. The Kids Are All Right does so many things well, but the characters end their story under an illusion that nothing at all has changed. Maybe that’s the point, but for me, it took away from much of the reward of watching the first 90 minutes.

Apropos of nothing, the title of this film has put the Supergrass song “Alright” in my head for the last week.

Next up: The 2011 remake of Jane Eyre, starring Mia Wasikowska, who played Joni in this movie, as the title character.