The Kids Are All Right opens with shots of 18-year-old Joni (a wonderful Mia Wasikowska) playing scrabble with friends and 15-year-old Laser (Josh Hutcherson) sniffing a crushed Sudafed with his skateboarding buddy Clay, all to Vampire Weekend’s “Cousins.” Joni and Laser are gorgeous, smart and nice. Despite the minor drug use and usual teenager angsts, they are, for the most part, very much all right.
But this movie is really about their parents—their mother Nic, a perfectionist, workaholic OB-Gyn (played by Annette Bening, who has made a career specialty out of wound-tight women), and their other mother, easy-going, nurturing earth girl Jules (a very fine Julianne Moore), who has maybe let her life slide past her. A long-married couple, Nic and Jules have, as parents do, put their kids first for so long that they have lost touch with themselves and each other.
And yet they remain very self-aware and caring people. When they question Clay’s rightness as a friend, it comes couched in a language of earnest self-actualization and higher consciousness that is both insightful and ridiculous: “It’s just that he seems… untended.” And “Is he the kind of friend who will help you grow?”
Untended Joni and Laser certainly are not. Nic and Jules are extremely conscientious parents, and a great deal of the humor in the early part of this film comes from the overmothering Joni and Laser endure. Nevertheless, Laser feels the lack of a male role model and it is at his urging that Joni, having recently turned eighteen, the age at which she can legally request contact, learns the identity of their sperm donor and gets in touch with him.
The sperm donor is Paul, played by the miraculous Mark Ruffalo, who can shade a dozen layers of feeling and thought into a single moment. I’ve sometimes found that his extraordinary openness can come off as ambivalence, but his characterization of Paul is founded on a bedrock of emotion. Paul is not only open to contact with Joni and Laser, he welcomes it.
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