The Kids Are All Right: A Gay Themed Movie Review

[TotallyOz]

Several years ago during the gay marriage debate in California one activist quipped we think we should have the same right to be miserable as straight people.

The Kids Are All Right is a film that sets out to prove that point and succeeds very, very well at it.

What makes this film such an important part of the ongoing gay civil rights movement in America is that it is essentially saying that gay relationships are no different at all from straight relationships and that gay parents are no different from straight parents. That the parents happen to be lesbians and not gay men is not important. You could make a nearly identical film with either gender.

The film is billed as a comedy and while it is funny in some places that's a bit of stretch. It draws heavily on the works of John Cheever (particularly his short story The Swimmer) and on Eugene O'Neill (particularly Long Day's Journey Into Night.)

The film takes place in the suburbs, but it's not the suburbs of The Brady Bunch. It's the suburbs where secrets are kept, lies told and old family tensions build up until they explode.

What's fascinating is that the lesbian couple, played by Annette Benning and Julianne Moore could be any set of parents. They have the same concerns as anyone else.

They are worried about their daughter going away to college. They are stressing about if their son might be gay. The one mom drinks too much (though in the tradition of Cheever and O'Neill this goes mostly unsaid. Functional alcoholism exists in this world, unlike the world of most Hollywood movies where alcoholics are completely dysfunctional.)

In this set up of suburbia Benning takes on the traditional husband role as provider working long hours as an OB/GYN while her wife takes care of the children. Moore's character wants to break out of this cycle and become her own person but her efforts to start her own business are dismissed by Benning and not taken particularly seriously.

To talk about the main plot point is not giving away a spoiler - since the title of the film comes from a song where the first line is I don't mind, other guys messing with my girl.

The adultery here though is particularly painful. The movie starts out with the couple's son and daughter deciding to find out and track down who their sperm donor was.

They discover that he's Mark Rufalo, playing a dude who owns his own organic farm and restaurant.

This is probably the most clunky device in the film, given that we know that Moore's character has to have an affair with someone and fucking the gardener is the biggest cliché in all of these types of stories, so we know right off the bat that, lesbian or not, she'll end up in his bed one way or another.

Ruffalo's character can be taken two ways. He's either a completely oblivious stoner dude who is just going with the flow or he's a manipulative bastard who sees these kids coming into his life as a way to get laid.

I tend to go for the latter, for while he never does anything about it, his hands rest just a little bit too long on the shoulders of the daughter's best friend in at least two scenes.

Even before Moore starts banging him Benning's character sees him as a threat. And, why wouldn't she. Up until this point she's seen herself as the dad to her children. Someone with an actual, if narrow, claim on the title threatens to undermine her sense of self within her own family.

And, of course, when she finds out that the biological father of her children is fucking her wife it psychologically undermines her position even more.

This all culminates with Moore finally screaming at Benning and the kids that marriage is a long haul, a lot of hard work and full of a lot of shitty moments and not some magical romantic fantasy.

Being a Hollywood film the couple does stay together the way many, if not most, real couples do when infidelity strikes. Along the way there are a lot of very real moments in the film.

The most obvious is when Benning and Moore have sex while watching gay male porn. Sexuality is a spectrum and up to 30 percent of gay male porn is consumed by women, so it makes sense that some of those women might be lesbian (particularly when you consider that one of the main reasons straight women don't like straight porn is they don't like comparing their bodies to those of the actresses. A lesbian couple would end up not only comparing her body but also the body of her partner to those of the women on screen.)

More subtle is how Benning's wine glass starts out with just a little more wine than anyone else's and gradually has more and more wine in it with each passing scene, to the point where her glass is almost overflowing, while everyone else has about half a glass.

The couple are also not portrayed as magical gays that can make no mistakes and are perfect people - one of the most enduring Hollywood cliches. Instead, they are real and have both their good points and their bad points.

The best example of this is when Moore has no problem at all firing her Mexican gardener and accusing him of being a cocaine addict, simply because she thinks he might suspect she's banging Ruffalo.

The movie doesn't really have an ending which makes sense. It starts out with a couple who have a less than perfect marriage and ends with their marriage less than perfect. There is no magic moment when things are suddenly OK.

The kids may be all right, but, the movie argues, marriage and suburbia are often not, and the psychic horrors that live behind closed doors exist no matter what you've got between your legs.