The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Annette Benning and Julianne Moore are great as two mothers struggling to maintain a good family life and to keep up the spirit of their relationship. They have two kids and the family seems to live a happy upper-middle-class kind of life. Their kids have decided to track down their sperm donor family. The father is a sympathetic bohemian guy who owns a restaurant and grows veggies in his backyard garden and who also seems a bit immature, the kind of guy who wants to live 'the good life'. The kids grow to like him - and so does one of the moms. This, of course, is a precarious situation that disrupts the former calm. The Kids are all right (dir. Cholodenko) investigates the alienation between children and parents without this becoming a film about super-dramatic conflicts. It focuses on the strains of ordinary life and how partners have started to take each other for granted. What we see is two person who are removed from a state of forgetfulness, a state of cozy everydayness that can be dangerous. The way this is transported into a film is generally successful. The actors are, as I said, doing very well and the choice to ground the film in ordinary life is exemplary. My only complaint is that the film sometimes feels a bit unfocused so that both the parental problems, the love issues and the kids' quandaries are not fully explored.