You Make (Us) Feel Like A Natural Woman

Review: The Kids Are All Right

The opening credits to The Kids Are All Right scroll around the screen like graffiti while skateboarders cruise the California streets, over grainy indie film stock and a Vampire Weekend song. Does the movie already intend to be ironic, or is there secret joy in being part of this hip vegan eco-crunch neighborhood? It's the land of opportunity, where a scruffy motorcycle man makes enough income from his organic restaurant to afford a sprawling, self-consciously indigenous garden in his backyard. It's also the land of normalcy, where two women can share the same over-represented suburban paradise/malaise as everyone else.

Director Lisa Cholokendo straddles this line of parody and sincerity as she navigates the problems of this upper-middle-family, headed by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. The two moms bicker over hers and hers sinks about their daughter off to college, and their son who isn't realizing his potential. Of course Bening's character Nic imposes too much, and can't please her wife Jules (Moore) emotionally or sexually. Nor does she support Jules' wandering ambition, now manifested in her new startup landscaping business.

It's harder to feel for Nic through all this. She's unfailingly uptight, while Jules' free-spirited (and somewhat free-loving) impulses befit her lackadaisical California lifestyle so well. But Cholokendo has created a comedy that finds humor in common relationship and parenting moments, such as two parents' simultaneous eagerness and reservation over the possibility their son is sleeping with his best friend. It's appropriate for a story about gay marriage that isn't really about being gay at all.


Cholokendo knows how to assemble a top-notch cast, with an especially luminous and relaxed Julianne Moore. Mark Ruffalo's leather jacket and five-o-clock shadow fit the sweet but impossibly naive sperm donor of the couple's son. His interaction with the family, over a few bottles of wine and a few more rolls in the hay, is an engaging comic premise--one laced ultimately, and realistically, with emptiness. The traditional family structure is what lasts.

This film shares some aspects of that other female-driven summer comedy, Eat Pray Love. That movie feels constantly like it's driving toward the inevitable romantic outcome; of course this independent woman will find a man. Yet the narrative wanders to get there. Maybe because the movie comes from a real-life quest for life and love, which seems manufactured but really happened as authentically as a writer with a book deal can proclaim. And though the makeup and wardrobe (not to mention culinary) budgets are many times the size of Cholokendo's, Julia Roberts has such a natural charm and radiance, we know everything's all right. Her men need her more than she needs them.