In his first few scenes of The Kids Are All Right, I thought Paul (Mark Ruffalo) was a strange, hippy guy. Driving a motorcycle may be dangerous, but Ruffalo makes it look très cool. As the movie progresses, Paul comes across as someone who would make for a cool uncle, which is convenient for a sperm donor who spontaneously enters his biological kids’ lives. Ruffalo has been in a number of cheesy chick flicks – Just Like Heaven, case in point – but this performance and his role in Canadian indie My Life Without Me prove why he is in the biz.
When Nic (Annette Benning) remarks how each kid is so similar to their respective biological mother, I suddenly realized how the film presented the characters precisely in this way. It wasn’t necessary for the movie to deliberately depict the ‘like mother, like child’ cliché, but this is precisely what writer and director Lisa Cholodenko did.
Considering that soap opera characters inspired the possible alternatives for my own name, I found it mildly funny that Joni (Mia Wasikowska) was named after Joni Mitchell. Let’s just hope that teen moms don’t think it’s cool to name their newborns after Ke$ha, or some other one hit wonder.
The hair department really should have done something different with Joni’s hair, instead of letting it look so plain and straggly. Just because she is more anxious about starting college and moving out than choosing which shade of lipstick to wear, doesn’t mean she can’t sport a ponytail every so often.
Without any spirited sophs carrying mini fridges in their jumpsuits, Joni’s campus is oddly quiet on move-in day when her unconventional family says their goodbyes. This would’ve been a good time to hire some college-aged extras looking to brag that they were on the same set as Julianne Moore.
Cholodenko tells an interesting story with minimal product placement courtesy of Volvo. She doesn’t conclude with a fairytale ending per se, as she leaves some questions unanswered (like Joni’s When Harry Met Sally situation), but reassures viewers everything will be all right, regardless of how dysfunctional a family is.