Oscar Catch-Up Round Two

The Kids Are All Right

I love two big Hollywood actresses agreeing to do this movie.  Ten years ago people would have been all scandalized or impressed that they spend some of that time kissing and hugging on each other.  Now we’re all pretty comfortable with The Gay (at least on our movie screens) and that’s not been an issue for this movie.  What was really fearless of these two women—Annette Bening and Julianne Moore—was for them to appear onscreen messy-haired and unmakeupped for the duration.  This is not one of these Nicole Kidman prosthetic nose deals.  These women showed their actual faces, how they actually look.  And they are lovely, lovely women, who happen to be old enough to convincingly play the mothers of teenagers, to be part of a couple that’s been together for the better part of two decades.  And OK with it.

They are a fun couple, and their lives are worth stepping into for two hours.  I love Bening’s character’s rant in the restaurant about how everybody is so compulsively green and granola-eating.  That’s how I feel every time I step into a Whole Foods.  Bening’s character, Nic, was my anchor in the movie.  She was probably everybody’s.  She just wanted to do her job, raise her kids, love her wife, and not have to go through the motions of embracing this weird guy—the Sperm Donor—who wants to step in.  But she makes valiant efforts because she loves her kids and it seems important to them.  And then it’s important to her wife, Jules (Moore), because the guy can get her business up and running.  And Nic makes valiant efforts there, too.  And she is unexpectedly bruised and burned for her efforts, and Bening does a beautiful job of crumbling under the duress and then holding the pieces together.

One problem with the movie is that it seemed to want me to care more about the kids than I could manage.  They had their own plotlines—the daughter had a platonic guy friend she was too afraid to kiss, and the son had fallen under the influence of his really ugly best friend.  These scenes were routinely uninteresting.

Jump ahead for The Fighter, True Grit, and a spoilery finish to my review of The Kids Are All Right