'The Kids Are All Right' transcends being queer

 

Opinion Synopsis: 
We liked it, but didn't love it. A good summer film. Had its great moments and its flaws. Great acting, funny dialogue, believable lesbians and their kids, too much time spent on the donor, happy ending. A nice comedy about a family. 

Mild spoiler alert! 
Stop here if you don't want to know any more before you see the film.


Character key:
Moms
Nic (Annette Benning), an OB-GYN doctor
Jules (Julianne Moore), trying to find herself via starting a landscape design business
Kids
Joni (Mia Wasikowska),18 and about to head to college
Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15 and somewhat lost in teenage boyhood
Sperm Donor
Paul (Mark Ruffalo), donated sperm for the cash and because it was more fun than donating blood. 

We gave it a two thumbs up, but not two big thumbs up. It's the kind of film that would have been fine to wait and see on DVD or at the Riverview, our favorite discount movie house, but for the tiny detail that the plot is built around a family headed by two lesbians and their two teenage kids are products of artificial insemination via an anonymous sperm donor. 


Since we haven't had a movie like that before, the stakes on it are very high - perhaps too high - within the queer community, especially the lesbian parenting community, and we've flocked to see it, comment on it, review it, and to love it or hate it.


I saw it with my spouse Susan this week and we both "just liked" it. We already knew the plot twisted around the kids finding their donor dad and one of the moms screwing him. We already knew there was wild debate within the lesbian community about whether that (the "het sex" as it is called in shorthand) made the movie a Hollywood sellout that capitulated to straight people (note director Lisa Cholodenko is queer, so the naysayers were disappointed in her, too).


But what makes the movie remarkable is this: It is first a spot-on portrayal of the complexities of modern American family life and is second a lesbian flick. 

Read more about this point in these great reviews by Vikki Reich at Up Popped A Fox, and Dana Rudolph at Mombian. As lesbian moms raising kids now with partners/spouses the stakes are pretty high for them for this movie, and they bring great insights to their reviews as a result. (My now-adult kids were raised during my straight marriage and then while I was a single lesbian mom, so my own stakes were different.) A terrific review of the movie by (gay dad) Dan Savage that details how the director took brave risks, yet could have pushed the plot even further is up at the New York Times. For balance, an extremely negative review that trashes the movie for the het sex and perceived capitulation to Hollywood and straight people can be found on The Lesbian Mafia.


Back to my review.

Having lesbian parents at the center of this family comedy adds layers of richness for we queer women folks. The script is deliciously speckled with dialogue and moments that are absolutely familiar and specific to lesbian relationships. And Annette Benning and Julianne Moore both give great performances that render those moments perfectly. Moments that transcend the narrow cast of them being a white, upper middle class family. My spouse, who is black, didn't raise my kids with me, or have kids of her own said after the movie, "I felt represented." As in "a part of my queer self was in that movie and it was a refreshing change from movies like this where the parents are always straight."


We both were annoyed but not outraged when Jules cheated on Nic by screwing the sperm donor. It could have been a woman and it would have read the same for us. It was about the cheating first, and about a man second.


And to the complaints that the only hot sex is the het sex, we didn't see any of the sex as all that hot. It was what it was. And think about this: It's common for two people in long term relationships who are busy with life and kids to have less sex, less good sex, and to have strayed emotionally from each other. The sex between Nic and Jules was in fact well rendered in that context. 


Our complaints are this: We wish the movie hadn't wasted so much screen time on the donor and the relationships he has with each mom and the kids. He was an interloper in their lives (Nic in fact calls him just that towards the end). He did nothing positive by entering their lives (invited by the kids who sought him out) other than answer some questions about what the donor might look and be like, and how his genes may or may not be reflected in the kids. The mess created by his boundarylessness and clueless interloping predictably turns this family upside down and then they rise up together, stronger and renewed in their rock-solidness at the end (a tried and true plot line about family life). We got tired of him and wish all that was captured in half the time the movie wasted on it (maybe that's my nod to the Hollywood capitulation).


I wish Cholodenko would have delved more into the kids. I would have loved more of the day to day between Nic and Jules. More sly dialogue and plot twists about life as a lesbian-headed family. More representation.


What I liked best about the film, despite these flaws, was it's everydayness. For years we lesbians have endured film after film with the same old tragic plot line: A solidly lesbian woman falls in love with a straight woman, has a torrid love affair, the straight woman can't or won't leave her straight life and goes off into the sunset to wherever she came from leaving the lesbian heartbroken/bitter/longing-for-something-she-can't-have. (Okay, we've also endured too many movies where lesbian love is ruined by a man. But I just don't see this movie as that.)

We watched those lesbian movies because we were desperate to see something, anything, that represented us, however flawed. We crammed together in movie houses and collectively gasped at "the kiss," at two women kissing. At the moment to not be invisible. 


For me, the ordinariness of the queer family in "The Kids Are All Right" is what makes it groundbreaking. They/we are queer. They/we are here. And they/we are "just a family." That we are clamoring for more, some of us demanding more, says we've come a very long way from being satiated by just a kiss.