How could a lousy movie about lesbian mothers get so much traction in 2010?
Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right is garnering tons of attention in year-end reviews. Both Entertainment Weekly critics rated it their second favourite movie of the entire year. And on the Golden Globes nomination list – it’s ridiculous for many other reasons, as well – the film received multiple nods.
I’ve already weighed in with my 2N review – see it here – but I feel compelled to complain with even more force as critics celebrate this cinematic travesty.
In Kids, everyone’s in a state of crisis. Joni’s about to go to college, her mother Nic, an overworked physician, is in a panic about that, her brother Laser is doing drugs and getting a bit too close to his boyfriend and Joni’s other mum Jules is still, after 17 years, unfocussed and drifting from profession to profession.
Enter sperm donor Paul – at the behest of the kids – who finds himself drawn to the children he spawned from a distance. He’s also drawn to Jules and hires her as a landscaper, whereupon their mutual attraction takes over.
You get the sense that someone walked into a producer’s office and pitched a story about a sperm donor who finds his soul when he meets his progeny only to be told that the writer better raise the stakes. Hence the ludicrous story line about the mum being hot for the sperm donor.
There are so many things profoundly insulting about this film. First off, there’s more heterosexual sex than lesbian sex. It’s a testimony to how threatening believable girl-on-girl action is in Hollywood that it would be eclipsed by straight sex and, lest we forget, the two mothers’ obsession with gay male porn. Sexually speaking, everything in The Kids Are All Right gets more screen time than dykes getting it on.
A lesbian relationship is so threatening that one of the dyke mums decides she’ll sleep with her children’s sperm donor. This is just plain creepy. The plot point debases the relationship and is completely unrealistic. Women, like myself and my partner, had to go through unbelievable travail to have our daughter – now 22. It was struggle from the moment we conceived the idea to the conception itself and even in the early years of our kid’s life, when our family was such an anomaly.
Women who have gone through the process would not get be attracted to the donor, let alone sleep with him. It would trash everything they’ve been doing for decades.
Speaking of which, can someone explain how Nic, the driven doc, would take 17 years to notice that her partner can’t get her shit together?
It’s especially upsetting that The Kids Are All Right comes out of the imagination of the great Lisa Cholodenko, who gave us the genius High Art and the very entertaining Laurel Canyon. Both those movies, though, are about larger-than-life situations and personalities – High Art feaures lesbian drug addicts (Ally Sheedy and Patricia Clarkson) and Laurel Canyon is about an egomanical and manipulative record producer (Frances McDormand).
So go ahead – make them outrageous and hard to believe. But lesbian motherhood is our lives – real, radical, beautiful.
We deserve better.
