The Kids are All Right

One of the things I love in the summer movie season is to find the smaller indie pictures that are being released. Last year 2 of my favorite movies of the year, (500) Days of Summer and The Hurt Locker, were indie films released in the summer. This year, The Kids are All Right was being praised left and right as one of the best movies of the year and it seemed like a no brainer that it would be the best of the indie offerings. With my love of all things Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore and lesbian, mixed with the wonderful reviews, I could not have been more excited about this. Plus, I love movies that are about family dynamics and have a good mix of comedy and tragedy. Of course, with my expectations up so high, there is always a chance of the film not meeting them and me leaving disappointed. Well, luckily for me, that did not happen here.

Nic(Annette Bening) and Jules(Moore) are a pretty typical couple raising a pretty typical family with two kids, Joni(Mia Wasikowska) and Laser(Josh Hutcherson). Well, as typical as a family can be when the father of both children was an anonymous sperm donor. As she turns 18, Joni is talked into finding out about her father by Lazer because he is not old enough yet and he wants to know. The kids to this behind the back of their mothers and they meet Paul(Ruffalo). Lazer is not sure he likes Paul, but Mia does and soon Paul becomes a part of their lives, much to the disdain of Nic. Nic, a severe type A personality worries that Paul is going to put a wedge between the family, but Jules wants to give Paul the benefit of the doubt. Jules is trying to get a landscaping business going and Paul offers her a job and soon the two are spending a lot of time together and eventually begin an affair. For Paul it might be love, but for Jules, she is just trying to feel attractive again, or just feel something again.

Told with just the right amounts of heart, humor and pain,The Kids are All Right is worthy of all the praise being thrown at it. The script is refreshingly sharp, balancing the sentimentality of a loving family with the biting sense that families are not perfect. The words as delivered by each actor jump off the screen and live your soul as you can relate so many of the things going on. Writer/Director Lisa Choloenko ushers in this wonderful family dynamic and while the lesbian family is not something she can just gloss over, she treats it not as a novelty, but as a regular family, which is nice. Maybe it is stupid to have to point that out, but it is important. I have not seen any of Cholodenko's other features, but she is a confident director, with a good eye for pacing and she knows how to get exactly the right shot and the right emotion from each character.

Nic and Jules are loving parents and a loving couple, but life gets in the way and people mess up. Moore completely nails Jules aloofness and her need to be desired. She is a character who lives by her emotions and she needs to feel to live. Bening has the toughest job because Nic is the most unlikable character. She has to balance the type A personality without going too far to that direction where you feel no sympathy for her in the third act and that sympathy is invaluable when the movie blows the door open on the affair. Ruffalo probably puts in his best performance to date. He is charming, but kind of creepy, but he also never lets himself just be the villain the movie could have portrayed him as. his Paul is definitely a douchebag, but he feels things and while Paul is ultimately vilified by the other characters, I still felt bad for him. The two kids hold their own against all of these fantastic actors as well. Hutcherson could have made Lazer nothing more than a typical teenage boy, and while there are elements of that, he gives Lazer something extra. His performance is subtle, but he does demand your attention. I expect big things from this kid. Wasikowska also gives a subtle performance, but it is definitely the more show-off youth performance. She gets the big dramatic screaming scene and she handles it perfectly.

The Kids are All Right is the kind of movie I bet gets better with each viewing because there is something new to get from the characters each time. The story is important, but how the characters react to the story is more important. There are some absolutely perfect scenes, like all of the dinner table scene, and I think they found the exact perfect ending. I was very curious about 20 minutes from the end about how it would end. It is exactly the kind of ending this movie needs. The bigger story is not over, so they could not give us a complete ending, but the story of their lives that we get to see is over and I think this section of their lives ended exactly the way it needed to end.

With wonderful writing, strong direction and excellent performances all around, I would not be surprised to see this movie up for some awards in a few months and hopefully, it gets put back in theaters so more people can check it out because it is definitely worth checking out. So many family ensemble movies go too far in one direction, but The Kids are All Right manages to find the perfect blend of every aspect of the family dynamic.

Final Grade: A