8-5-10 Movie Review:  The Kids Are All Right

Not a lot going on, noncommercial-wise, between now and Wednesday night. But some of what there is is unusual. For one thing, the Orpheum is reviving the old practice of the double feature with its Icon Series Friday and Saturday at 6:30. Tomorrow night is John Wayne night, with his Oscar movie True Grit and one of his best light westerns, Rio Bravo, with Dean Martin as a drunk, Walter Brennan as a sidekick, Angie Dickenson as a heroine, and Ricky Nelson in one of his few screen appearances when he didn’t play himself, all under the direction of Howard Hawks. That’s tomorrow at 6:30 in the Orpheum. And Saturday – same time, same place – celebrates Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in two top comedies, The Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby – in which baby is a leopard. That’s 6:30 Saturday, in the Orpheum.

And on Wednesday, the Murdock Theatre and Working Films Inc. is showing – with a question-and-answer session following – a Center for Investigative Reporting documentary called Dirty Business: “Clean Coal” and the Battle for Our Energy Future at 7 in the Murdock Theatre, 536 North Broadway.

And commercially, we have an unusually grownup and unusually fine movie about the family, in The Kids Are All Right.

The family in The Kids Are All Right is unusual only in that the parents are a pair of lesbians, Annette Bening as the controlling one and Julianne Moore as the more domestic one, with Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson as the kids achieved by sperm donation by Mark Ruffalo.

The lesbian angle is almost ignored, the family being treated like any other family by director Lisa Cholodenko and writer Stuart Blumberg and all the characters. Moore even seems a little shaky as to her orientation. She is like son Hutcherson in also being a little shaky as to what she wants out of life, while daughter Wasikowska resembles Bening in certainties about things; gender stereotypes are pretty well avoided, and characters are carefully individualized within a somewhat stereotyped pattern of family types.

All of these characters are basically level-headed and aware of the advantages and disadvantages of both their present situations and any alternatives that seem to offer themselves; they flare up sometimes under circumstances that call for it, but they soon calm down and behave in quite reasonable ways. This denies us Hollywood histrionics, but blesses us with characters we can believe in and sympathize with, though I found myself being more a deeply interested observer than an emotionally charged one.

The situation is basically simple enough and sufficiently united by the limited cast to provide a clearer structure than current movie audiences seem to require, and there are no bows to melodrama or sentimentality. And despite the somewhat inarticulate characters’ occasional attempts to interpret what it all means to them individually, the audience is left to make its own interpretations and evaluations, and there are realistic loose ends all around – in that respect, The Kids Are All Right is in tune with the times. In most other respects, it is better than that.