The Kids Are All Right – 5

The kids may be all right, but this movie was about their parents, and the relationship between Julianne Moore and Annette Bening left me cold. Maybe my unfamiliarity with lesbian couples, in person or onscreen, influenced my lack of understanding; but the director’s obsession with showing us a lesbian couple bothered me, especially when these actresses are so familiar for straight roles, and one is even married to Warren Beatty, for goshsakes. Every line of dialogue between them was punctuated with a “dear” or “babe,” and how often do you see a straight married couple in a movie having routine sex? For awhile I thought there would be a nice dramatic arc, with the sperm-donor-father Mark Ruffalo bringing about character growth in each member of the family, but that idea sort of petered out, and the movie ended, to no apparent point at all, with the daughter’s departure for college. By the end, the family saga – and that’s about all there was to the film – resembled Toy Story 3 more than Squid and the Whale.