Film: "The Kids Are All Right" (2010)

I was prepared to really dislike this film, based on what I'd heard about it and some truly bizarre (in the sense of straight-audience-pleasing) statements by writer/director Lisa Cholodenko. But I liked it, quite a lot in fact, despite some criticism of my own.



I'll get the negative stuff out of the way, then move on to talk about what I liked. I think that the dislike of great part of the lesbian "community" is justified. Not so much because of the tired cliche of the lesbian character who sleeps with a man: it is indeed a cliche, but one that Cholodenko pretty much dismantles by the end of the film by having Jules literally laugh at Paul's proposal that she leave her family in order to be with him. Paul (the sperm donor the lesbian couple's teenage children contact out of curiosity and with whom Jules starts a brief affair) is rightly dismissed as the roll-in-the-hay/interloper he is, while the entire family leaves him standing outside the door and looking in at what he can't have. I have no problem at all with that storyline with this outcome.

However, some visual choices made by Cholodenko are strongly off-putting, because throughout the film she shows het sex in great detail, both between Paul and Jules (one half of the lesbian couple) and between Paul and his casual fuck buddy Tanya, while at the same time Jules and Nic (the other half of the lesbian pair) hardly ever go beyond affectionate kisses and failed attempts at being turned on by slightly cheesy male gay porn. Hell, the viewers get to see more of the gay action in the film the girls are watching than action by the ladies themselves. That is quite disappointing.

Of course long-term marriages of all genders and sexualities run the risk of becoming less exciting as time pSSES, but the reality is that in a film that is supposed to be centred around a lesbian family, the lesbians themselves are mostly desexualised, unless in the presence of a dick. The scene where Jules pulls down Paul's pants and goes OMG! at the sight of his penis is unredeemably loathsome. Cholodenko is clearly aware of the kind of message this is sending: she chooses to portray unthreatening lesbians who can't interfere with the larger (i.e. straight) appeal she's hoping to generate; but to expect then that at least part of the lesbian audience would not to be pissed off at the result would be disingenuous. I guess an Oscar nomination is worth it, to her.

That being said, the film is overall charming, especially in showing how the vulnerability of the adolescents is matched by an even greater vulnerability on the part of the adults who crave their affection (and the affection of each other). In fact, the kids are stronger, because their lives are still open to new possibilities, while the grown-ups have already made their choices and must live with those: Nic and Jules have their suburban, open-minded, modern family not devoid of everyday angst and fear of failure ("marriage is hard" tells Jules in her great final monologue); Paul is living on the fumes of an over-extended youth, a gentle Peter Pan suddenly craving a ready-made family. But as Nic tells him in my favourite moment of the entire film, if he wants one, coolness (or the gift of his sperm) won't cut it: he needs to make his own, sweat and tears and late sleepless nights.

I like that all the actors have the courage to be sympathetic to their characters, but also to show their flaws quite openly, except perhaps for the lovely young performers who play the adolescent children: they show a kind of purity that goes with the hope of youth. The petulant ones, those who think they are owed something while hiding the signs of their failure, are the grown-ups. The kids, in the meantime, are all right.

It's a film filled with the more intelligent music of these kids'generation, their clothes and haircuts, the soft colours of late summer. There's a beautiful scene where Paul and Nic bond over their shared passion for Joni Mitchell (it makes the revelation that Paul and Jules have been fucking all the more heartbreaking): they sing together, badly; Nic closes her eyes and you know that the images that run through her head at that moment have all to do with the memory of her own youth. But Paul's collection is old and "eclectic", reflecting his many unfinished passions, as incomplete as the garden that Jules will leave behind for him. We don't hear those records played, just remembered by untrained voices, aged faces full of life but marked irreparably by time, as the kids look on with amusement.

Paul mentions that they are an alternative family, but he's wrong, because he bases this illusion on a lie and on the premise that he can simply insert himself in other people's lives, without the groundwork necessary to get there. He's not bad, and we're invited to feel compassion and sympathy for him, but he is disappointing: like Joni, the daughter of Jules and Nic who's about to go to college, we wish he'd been "better".

It's not that Jules and Nic are any less disappointing, but they are so in the context of a commitment and a shared history of which we catch only a few glimpses, but that is there, strong enough to get them over this hurdle and earn them their children's indulgence. Not once does either of them consider breaking up and that is something that is both bewildering to the moralist in me and a beautiful reminder that these two women have made their choice a long time ago and are sticking with it, even as the kids start to leave home.

Or more simply, as their son Laser warns them, they should not break up because they're too old. Only, we saw them looking as small and lost as teenaged girls a few minutes earlier, as they hugged their daughter goodbye with the desperation of a child holding on to his parent's hand on his first day of school.

As she asks Nic and the children to forgive her, Jules says, in way of justification: "Perhaps, if I'd read more Russian novels..." But clearly, one learns about pain by causing and living it; the reading and the making sense of it come later. We can imagine a future of nights where Jules and Nic will be reading Tolstoy in bed together, getting greater satisfaction from that than from outdated gay porn.