The Kids are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010)

Having seen barely any of the Oscar nominated films I am slowly getting around to them now. And The Kids are All Right was the first on the list. I love Lisa Cholodenko. High Art is one of my favourite films, but it is hardly mainstream. So I was interested to see what she would do with a film that was going to be easier to handle for a wider audience but still have lesbian themes in place.

I suppose one of the things that make this film a bit ground-breaking is that no time is really spent on explaining the set up. Obviously the fact that the parents are gay gives the film the plot, with the introduction of the donor and what that does to the family being the main thrust, but the family set up is shown to actually be less dysfunctional than more regular families. And it becomes more about how the relationships between a couple and their children are complicated regardless of gender and sexuality. By not making a drama about sexuality and crediting an audience with an acceptance of the family structure normalises it which is no bad thing.



So, the plot is that two teenagers from a lesbian couple decide to look up their donor father, and in so doing put the stability of the family at risk. And the father, who has avoided the stability of family life for the alternate pleasures of freedom and younger women, starts to question whether he made the right decision and if he wouldn’t quite like a family after all, particularly now that he has gone some way to helping to create one. It manages to feel quite real and heart wrenching while also being very entertaining.



Annette Bening has been widely praised for her performance and she is spectacular. Her character is a bit uptight as the high achiever, bread winner and stricter parent, Nic. She is a little difficult to love and her wife, Jules, is infinitely more laid back and instantly likeable. So it is clever that it is Jules who does the most to put the family in jeopardy, as we see the devastation it causes to Nic and the scene where she realises what the situation is is utterly crushing. To sympathise with one and then the other is an effective way of demonstrating what the implications are. And Bening plays both the hard and the soft to great effect.

Julianne Moore has a role that is much more fun, and the hippy-ish slacker type that I came across a lot when I lived in Santa Cruz. She has that California slang and intonation down. And it is also funny to see a woman who maybe hasn’t grown out of those youthful traits that I always assume get forced out of you with age and responsibility.



Mark Ruffalo’s character is also well done. The idea of the man who hasn’t applied himself but is doing ok, sleeping with young beautiful women (like the insanely beautiful Yaya DaCosta), riding about on a motor bike and thinking that he has this great life of freedom and lack of responsibility finding himself face to face with his children and the representation of the other path he could have chosen. It is a credit to the film that this long-admired male figure, who hasn’t bowed down to the constraints of family life, is seen as a little bit pathetic and not necessarily to be envied at all.



Mia Wasikowka and Josh Hutcheson are great as the children, both remarkably mirroring the traits of their mother as each of the women used the donor sperm to have a child. The perfect, high achieving Joni is Nic’s daughter and Laser (best character name ever?!?) with his aimlessness is of course Jules’s son. The sibling rivalry of their relationship and their differing experiences of teenage life all ring incredibly true.



So all in all a really lovely film about a slightly unconventional, but actually probably not that unconventional (Cholodenko herself is a lesbian mother) family and the troubles that come with that proximity level of expectation. In terms of being purely enjoyable, I think this film has succeeded more than many others I have seen recently. And it just happens to have lesbians in it.

Nenette (Nicolas Philibert, 2010)

Is it disengenuous to suggest, as a documentary maker, that you have no agenda and you are letting a story tell itself without trying to make the story follow your idea of what it should be? This is the claim of Nicolas Philibert. That he wants the story to tell itself and for the audience to make of it what they will. While I don't feel that Philibert forces his opinion I do think that as a director you chose the scenes, you chose the order and you edit as you wish. Which provides, in some small way, a structure and story of your choice.

But honestly, that is nit picking (orangutans - nit picking - geddit?!) at best. Because in comparison with a lot of what passes for cinematic entertainment this film is thought provoking, intelligent and achingly original.



It brings up questions of the justification of keeping animals enclosed for human entertainment and/or education, how apes become a mirror to ourselves and how we feel as humans, whether work and a purpose is more pleasurable than leisure and even incest and contraception. I kid you not.

The camera shows the inhabitants of the enclosure only. Nenette, a 40 year old orangutan who has been in captivity for 38 years, her son and another mother and child. We hear human voices, school children, a Japanese tourist, a romantic widow, and Nenette's keepers but we don't see them. The incredibly bored and sad seeming face of Nenette dominates the screen for much of the time. And in this I fall into one of the traps that the film sets, or at least raises for our contemplation. Is she bored or sad? Because she is close to a human genetically can we relate our emotions to her? Are we mistaking inactivity for morose behaviour? Really, the answer we come to is entirely up to us.



While one commentator seems slightly unhinged as she relates herself to the orangutan are we that far off as the audience in wanting to apply meaning to everything. In apparently not doing it himself is Philibert making us question our navel gazing nature? Our absolute insistence that we must assess and make sense of everything. Or is she just a personable animal in a cage who likes to drink her tea, eat her yoghurt and take it easy, giving her old bones a rest for the final years?