Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play Nic and Jules, a long-committed couple with two teenage children. Joni (Mia Wasikowska) is a National Merit Scholar about to head off to college; her younger brother, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), is a kid who's perhaps just on the cusp of being aimless (his mothers both worry that he may be hanging out with the wrong crowd), though all he's really going through is the usual confused-teenager stuff. And in some ways, as even his name subtly implies, he's the most attuned and focused of everyone in this seemingly loose, laid-back West Coast family: At his urging, Joni -- who's over 18, as he is not -- tracks down the sperm donor who supplied half the raw goods of their genetic makeup. That guy turns out to be Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a somewhat zonked-out restaurant owner who agrees to meet his two offspring as readily, and as unthinkingly, as someone might make the choice between wearing sneakers or flip-flops on a given day. When he learns that the people who put his mother lode of genetic code to use are two women, he spends a befuddled third of a second processing the information before blurting out, "Right on! I love lesbians."
Joni and Laser, who at first keep their detective work a secret from the people they call "the moms," take some tentative first steps toward getting to know Paul, though Laser is the more cautious of the two. When Nic and Jules find out what the kids have been up to, they reluctantly agree to meet Paul, who gradually becomes more entangled in their lives. That's as much a surprise to Paul as it is to anyone: This is a guy who's programmed to avoid entanglements, as we see in the way he cruelly casts aside a sometime girlfriend (Yaya DaCosta) who's also a hostess at his restaurant. But as he gets to know his kids better, he begins flirting with fatherhood -- and although that's not the same as committing to it, the deepest commitments, as many of us know, often begin with flirtation.
The Kids Are All Right is certainly topical in light of the national gay-marriage debate. But this isn't a picture that's out to make points or delineate political issues; if anything, it treats gay marriage as the no-brainer issue it is. This is, to put it simply, a very funny movie about people who are confused at best and in pain at worst, and Cholodenko's capacity to laugh with her characters, as well as to feel deeply for them, is what makes it remarkable. Cholodenko has the Paul Mazursky touch, the casual, affectionate luster he brought to bear in pictures like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Next Stop, Greenwich Village, among others. Like him, she allows moments to take shape between characters, instead of trying to force those moments into any kind of thematic framework. And she allows herself, and us, to laugh at those characters just a little when they lapse into touchy-feely psychobabble.
But she also lets us see the strata of feeling that lie beneath that stream of words. Moore's character, the more freewheeling spirit in this couple, could happily talk for hours about her own and everyone else's feelings; Bening's Nic, a no-nonsense doctor, pushes back with perhaps too much common sense. After Moore suggests that Nic might ride Joni a bit less about getting her graduation-gift thank-you notes out on time, Nic shoots back, "If it were up to you, our kids wouldn't bother to write thank-you notes -- they'd just send out good vibes."
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.