Arriving on a wave of considerable awards buzz, The Kids Are All Right is the latest – and already the most successful – movie by writer/director Lisa Cholodenko, previously best known for High Art and Laurel Canyon. Like those films sexual identity is a central plot concern, which has caused the film to become the subject of plenty of column inches what with the issue of gay marriage still being a hot button topic in the US.
Telling the story of a happy same-sex family based around lesbian couple Julianne Moore and Annette Bening (amusingly referred to as ‘the moms’ by their kids) their smart 18 year old daughter Joni who’s about to leave for college and their impossibly cool and/or pretentiously named 15 year old son Laser.  As Joni is now legally an adult she is encouraged by Laser to track down their sperm donor dad, who turns out to be the impossibly cool restaurant owner Mark Ruffalo, although needless to say the more involved he gets in the family, the more trouble arises.
Despite the meaty subject matter most of the movie passes by at a mostly unhurried, uneventful pace, much like Cholodenko’s previous films. It’s a style that could be described as being charmingly loose, or more accurately in this case as flimsy and unsubstantial. Essentially what you get is a bunch of attractive people waffling on in attractive places, accompanied by a very cool soundtrack, when really the subject and the actors deserve better. Julianne Moore in particular is fantastic, and fans will be pleased to hear that the film provides her with opportunity to deliver another one of her seemingly effortless break-down scenes (the fact that she’s still not won an Oscar may be the biggest mystery in Hollywood) but in truth there are excellent performances pretty much across the board, even from the kids (who include Alice in Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska). So it’s a shame that the script doesn’t live up to their performances – the characters have nicely drawn details, and there are moments of real wit, but for the most part the dialogue seems to consist of stilted, therapist-style speech which is rather at odds with the muted, relaxed filming (to be fair to Cholodenko and her co-writer Stuart Blumberg they do acknowledge the overly analytical dialogue late on in the film with an amusing outburst from Bening’s character about tomatoes, but by this point it’s too little too late). It also certainly wouldn’t have hurt for the film to go through a bit more judicious pruning before it was released, as plenty of inessential exchanges (if not whole scenes) have been left in to create a rather overinflated running time.
Thanks to a great cast, an interesting subject matter and some beautiful photography, the kids may indeed be alright, but they could have been fantastic with a better script to work from.