245) The Kids Are All Right (2010)

245) The Kids Are All Right (2010) Dir: Lisa Cholodenko Date Released: July 2010 Date Seen: August 4, 2010 Rating: 1/5

The dialogue and the scenario in The Kid Are All Right are so perversely alien that all of writer/director Lisa Cholodenko's attempts at making a lesbian couple look normal--within a sitcom understanding of normalcy--are in vain. Her terrible dialogue, truly inane double standards and loaded plot undermines her film's very premise. 


Cholodenko's film tries to make Julianne Moore and Annette Bening look like the ideal parents--caring, compassionate and very up-to-date on what their kids are doing--only to complicate that image through egregiously pat and half-hearted plot twists (She drinks! She screws! They're flawed, wawawaaa). I haven't felt so angry at a film for being so lazy in its storytelling nor so inept in its attempt to make "other" characters relatable in a long while. I was actually wailing at the screen while watching the film in theaters (my sister will confirm this; she asked me at one point if I was going to carry on like that throughout the film and I yelled, to the nearly empty theater, "But it's so bad!"). 

And for those that claim that Mark Ruffalo's character only had the tables turned on him at the film's end: no, that ignores the way that Cholodenko's film limps towards that conclusion throughout the film. The fact that he wants to redeem himself and be involved in their lives gives him a momentary reprieve from judgment but he really starts to fuck things up for himself when he starts screwing around with Moore's character. That's when he proves that he's always secretly wanted more than Cholodenko's willing to give. But from the start, Ruffalo's character just isn't a sympathetic guy, according to the film's logic. He's a cartoon: all the straight women around him give him the eye and after sex, he, being a true-blue hippy dip, stretches out on his futon wearing all denim--denim jacket and denim pants, too. Hippy scum! Home wrecker! Or take the comment he makes about how he doesn't like or necessarily believe in the good that institutionalized learning can do for students: this guy is an enemy to traditional family values! Spare me.