This Dig Would Be All Too Obvious

Let's just go ahead and get the hard part out of the way. I did not like Lisa Cholodenko's lesbian family drama The Kids are All Right. Everyone seems to disagree with me on every point, but I stand firm in my opinion that it's a meandering, stereotyped affair, without much of a story to tell.

Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson are the teenage children of a homosexual married couple (Annette Benning and Julianne Moore) who decide to contact and meet their sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo). Predictably, this sets off a chain of strained relations and lots of yelling. Every beat of actual plot movement is predictable, which wouldn't be a problem if any other aspect of the film rose above its premise. Instead we have several characters that never rise above their very broadly painted stereotypes, and a slew of little scenes probably meant to be character development, but are actually scenes that go nowhere and mean nothing and probably shouldn't be in the film at all.

There's also the problem of whose story the film is trying to tell. I don't mean to get all Screenwriting 101 here, but this really contributes to the films aimlessness. We start out with the perspective of both kids, then it quickly narrows to just Mia Wasikowska's. But once Ruffalo becomes a part of the film, the kids cease to mean much and could easily disappear entirely without affecting the plot. It remains a film about adults through the eyes of adults until the very end when they decide it's Wasikowska's eyes again. I thought this back and forth was mostly a way to manipulate my emotions. If you bookend the film with an innocent kid's perspective, it's like, duh, how could you not cry? She's watching her moms fall apart and have to work things out, and it's just sooo sad. But this is not even my biggest problem.

No. My biggest problem is that this family is unbelievable from the get-go. I have a hard time blaming the adult actors, as I know all three of them are some of the best actors working right now, but something is off. Do Moore and Benning really have absolutely no on-screen chemistry, or is the dialogue just so achingly stiff and without any natural flow? I found most verbal interaction in The Kids are All Right to be just that: stiff, flat, fake. And so much of it was horribly over-obvious exposition anyway. To be fair, Lisa Cholodenko is skilled behind the camera, and she does a great job of visually expressing her character's feelings. This really makes all the on-the-nose dialogue just that much more frustrating.

I think there is a good movie to mined from this premise, and Cholodenko's camera almost has it. A scene late in the film when Benning discovers a few secrets is absolutely chilling. A shallow focused close-up with Carter Burwell's score quietly building really works as a great scene. But it's also Cholodenko who works against the film. She's a co-writer, and the script feels uncomfortable with its characters. Half of the first act interactions really shoe-horn in the fact that our leads are lesbians, as if it were hard to figure out. Someone should right something for this talented director.


The Kids are All Right: 5/10

So I haven't written about any music lately, but I haven't stopped listening. Arcade Fire's new album, The Suburbs, is good. I actually think it's about half great/half bad, with every great song followed by a boring one. 16 songs tackling the same thing starts to feel a bit overwhelming. Los Campesinos! did this early this year with Romance is Boring, but the album is a good twenty minutes shorter, and almost every song is bursting with life. Arcade Fire also have seem to be dealing with a problem of not having their own sound anymore. This album suffers from how much it resembles any number of '80s groups; from Depeche Mode to Kenny Loggins, The Cure to generic '80s stadium rock. To compare again to a superior album released this year, Titus Andronicus' The Monitor is only 10 songs over the course of an hour, all about one young man's love/hate relationship with his small hometown. They also go for an '80s rock sound, even yelling "Baby, we were born to die" in the opening track. The difference is they mix their love for Bruce and the '80s with punk, country, folk, and other things to make music that feels new and original. Arcade Fire just kind of sounds like the '80s filtered through current indie rock.

But I still like it anyway.

Oh, and the track "Month of May" is embarrassingly terrible.