The Kids Are All Right

 

Received at Sundance as a kind of pansexual Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (in which a lesbian couple and their teenage children meet the sperm donor who made their family possible), The Kids Are All Right is a lot better than that description makes it sound—this may be the unlikeliest triumph for a potentially maudlin family drama since You Can Count on Me. In fact, it’s really a movie about the push-pull between accomplishment and regret: Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) are a longtime couple settling into middle age. Their son, Laser (Hutcherson), hangs out with a possible bad influence, while their daughter, Joni (Wasikowska), is about to leave for college. At Laser’s urging, Joni takes advantage of her 18th birthday to make contact with their anonymous-donor father (Ruffalo), a restaurateur who’s intrigued by the possibility of the kids he never raised.

If all of this sounds slightly precious, Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg’s screenplay refuses to let anything play out the way you’d expect—the movie is notable for its flexible view of sexuality—and they have an ear for awkward exchanges like few others. (These aren’t limited to the parents; Joni is frustrated with her own romantic woes.) In any case, you couldn’t ask for a sharper ensemble: It’s one thing to make a movie about a family. It’s another to have the actors actually convince as one.