REVIEW: Brilliant Kids Are All Right Brims with Grace, Smarts and Laughs

Movieline Score:

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That line of dialogue is just one small example of how Cholodenko -- who co-wrote the script with Stuart Blumberg -- captures the everyday textures of a relationship: In any partnership, at least every once in a while, someone's always going to be roughing up the nap. Cholodenko has made some terrific, smartly crafted movies (High Art, Laurel Canyon); my biggest complaint about her as a filmmaker is that she doesn't work often enough. (A feature she made in 2004, Cavedweller, with Kyra Sedgwick and Aidan Quinn, came and went with barely a ripple.)

Cholodenko always treats her characters as people, not as mouthpieces for ideas. A friend of mine once gave a play he wrote to a trusted friend in order to get her opinion; she had problems with his approach: "You have to love your characters," she told him, "even the stupid ones, for what they are." That bit of advice should seem obvious. But even independent filmmakers, the ones we're supposed to laud as being braver and smarter than their Hollywood counterparts, don't always love their characters. (I can't see much love, for example, in that critics' favorite Winter's Bone; to me it feels as clinical as a sociology experiment, an expert foray into the godforsaken territory of how the other half lives. Face it: The kind of people Winter's Bone is supposed to be about are the very people who would, wisely, never pay money to see a movie like Winter's Bone.)

Cholodenko, it appears, doesn't even have to think about loving her characters -- she wouldn't know how to work any other way. That's one way to create wide-open spaces for your actors, and every performer here rises to the challenge. Wasikowska and Hutcherson don't play their characters as featureless sitcom kids; they emerge as individuals with both harsh flaws and astonishing, subtle gifts. Ruffalo, with that half-piercing, half-checked out gaze, is marvelous, suggesting that Paul's spaciness might actually be an untapped capacity for real, grown-up love.

But it's Bening and Moore who keep the movie spinning; they're glorious to watch. Moore gets the lion's share of the movie's laughs: Jules is an aspiring landscaper, and at one point she shows up for a job kitted out in full safari gear (including lace-up boots with socks), clomping through the client's yard suggesting a look that's "lush, overgrown, fecund." Moore is never afraid to be the good-natured buffoon, but that makes her serious moments that much more intense. When she stops short and suddenly says to Paul, "I just keep seeing my kids' expressions in your face," it's a lovely twist on the sort of thing mothers often say to their children as they reflect on the myriad surprises of genetic combination.

Bening, though, is the one who just might break your heart. Nic has her own fantastically comic moments (most notably a rant against a number of things that annoy her, including others' endless chatter about heirloom tomatoes and composting). But mostly, Nic is a woman trying to make sense out of a world that almost never makes sense, and Bening dances along that knife's edge of self-determination and helplessness so gracefully that you almost forget how cutting it really is. She's mighty, like a rose.

It's also impossible not to notice that Bening looks pretty much her age, as Moore does. (They're 52 and 49, respectively.) Both are extraordinarily beautiful, with the additional advantage that their faces move. There's an unspoken rule that we're not supposed to talk about how well or how badly actresses are aging, but why not break it? There's so much pleasure to be had in seeing faces that look just as they should, faces that aren't desperately trying to look as if they belong to a younger person. That's just one of the pleasures Cholodenko and her cast offer us in The Kids Are All Right. And if it's a pleasure that seems slight, just think how seldom other filmmakers, and other performers, offer it to us.

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Comments

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    Gay marriage has certainly become a no-brainer (for liberals, that is), but the reason for this isn't worth our applause. Basically, as with Darwin's theory of natural selection, agreeing with gay marriage isn't so much a conclusion you come to as it is a prerequisite for membership into a club, for being in any way relevant (again, amongst liberals). Being liberal right now isn't so much about a style / spirit of thinking -- being open, tolerant, ranging, but very critical -- but in your holding true to a firm, absolutely delineated point of view. Not thought, not brain, but accoutrement and right-of-way -- a blow horn to announce your allegiance, a sword to smite your foes. Gay marriage isn't something to be thought about, not so much because it EVIDENTLY IS worthy, but because even in your considering it, your evaluating it, you've shown you're not one of the makeup to instinctively JUST KNOW its rightness, to have always been aware of the obvious, and therefore your (what in truth your "evaluating" really is) all-too-easily-managed straying from the path, your impurity, your actually quite horrifying susceptibility to being (nothing but) a bigot.
    So we as liberals haven't so much evolved, or even won -- in fact we've devolved, or lost, in embracing victory, and shielding from ourselves our knowledge that it is backed mostly through gifts (the more fit sense [dopamine rush] you instantly feel once you adopt the liberal paradigm), and by punishment -- the forgottenness that is yours to know, once you've been excommunicated. Evolution, natural selection, used to be the kind of thing liberals considered but were willing, if it didn't strike them as measuring up, to actually (near) dismiss -- witness in the 60s / 70s the lefty, the Gaian, the gay-marriage-supporting William Irwin Thompson's conclusion that the theory was well lacking -- and so too were once gay relationships / orientations considered, explored -- again, by liberals -- and TRULY sympathetically, as originating out of the likes of unconscious self-protection -- something never just to be celebrated or accepted -- without some substantial "caveat," at least -- that is.
    I think it was an active strain of feminist thought once to consider lesbianism as owing to an unconscious desire to escape disapproval, reprisal, in "agreeing" to forego men and instead livelong bond to women, and thereby never truly leave mother (many Chodorow quotes are right now coming to mind) -- if it wasn't, what has me guess this is that for certain feminists used to explore and blast the psychological damage their mothers visited on them as much or more -- it sometimes seemed -- than they did that owing to men -- and I know for certain that gay men once actively engaged the possibility that their "attachment" to men was born PRIMARILY, ESSENTIALLY out of a desire to permanently disengage themselves from (early-known incestuous handling from) their mothers. This today is not psychology, though, but psychobabble (a category now so corrupt but powerful I suspect it could entomb Freud himself) -- which in this case, doesn't necessarily make you a republican, but certainly puts you in the company of the mad, lost, and laughable.
    So this film isn't about lesbians (which tells us nothing, really), but, appropriately, about particular, specific, REAL parents, and their relationships with their (equally well considered and rightly begotten) kids. And their kids' troubles are not particular to their having lesbian parents, but simply and conclusively in their being of a certain age, to their being children of parents. We're no longer doing the cruel in using characters, people, for the purposes of making / advancing an argument; we -- or the most beautifully evolved amongst us -- are finally now executing what we just weren't up to managing from the beginning: we believe most in THEM, not in our own whatever crusades, and are letting their REALNESS determine, take full charge of, all that unfolds. Finally, out of this kind of appropriateness and generosity, our journey can begin.
    This is the only liberal way to get at this film. My guess is, though, that if it doesn't get at how the partners' lesbianism is affecting their children, if it doesn't empower children who grew up with lesbian mothers, or who were mostly raised by women, who watch the film, to understand / intuit that their lack of a father -- or more importantly -- that their being raised by all mom(s) is something they have every right to explore as being actually detrimental to them, as affecting them adversely, and not just for certain of but ho-hum consequence, then the film is actually still focussed on pleasing / soothing liberal parents, their prejudices and preferences, at the expense of kids: it's still sham -- some of it, at least; not what it gives off every odor of appearing to be.
    I was raised by a single, very liberal, mother. I didn't have two moms, but knew ALL mom. I've seen and known boys who were raised by two -- again, very liberal -- moms. Because we all had the good fortune of being raised by mothers who were predisposed to be progressive, to have enough in themselves to well care about others, to be kind and loving and support social / political movements that enfranchised their good leanings, we were far better off than the good majority of those raised by long-together, mother-father parents. But also, because we were raised by mothers immature enough, fearful and broken enough, to never leave their, or were ultimately drawn to retreat back into, being in profound sense still owned by their own mothers, we've known considerable childhood / teenage troubles --damage, quite frankly -- owing to their lesbianism, to their own psychological (and sad) "retreat" and its consequent repercussions, and not just so innocuously to our just having known every kid's experience of teenage "sturm und drang."
    I have heard your praise / account of how love for people becomes manifest in this film, and bet when I see the film I'll agree with most of it, but I have a suspicion this film helps further bury people too. Will I mostly see what follows from the open door, or sense the masterful, artful closing of one? I look forward to finding out.

  • Heather says:

    What a beautifully-written review.

  • richie-rich says:

    gorgeous review from Stephanie, and an interesting response from Patrick.
    I am gay, and i suspect i'll love this movie...since Bening & Moore are favorites, and SZ is the best critic writing today. Patrick, I think you think too much, and i think you think very well. I wish you well with all my heart.

  • Tamar says:

    Dude. This is a comments section on a movie review. If you want to publish a critical theory essay on liberalism, gay marriage, gay parenting, and feminism, I suggest you do so in a more appropriate venue.

  • Patrick McEvoy-Halston says:

    Thanks, Richie-Rich. To you as well.

  • Olivia would not understand this sentence teacher, Fei Qiang single curse? He dare to do? He only just started graduate, dare own brother ah. Olivia really do not understand Qiang, with his temper now, single Fei really want to become the kind of corrupt officials estimated the ancient professors do not go, he ran up the pointed nose scolded.

  • REVIEW: Brilliant Kids Are All Right Brims with Grace, Smarts and Laughs - Movieline

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