Anyone else miss Lisa Cholodenko, director of Laurel Canyon and High Art? It took seven years, but she's back with a (lesbian plus coming of age) comedy that was a giant success at Sundance.
A list of things this movie appears to involve that we don't get to see a lot of, which we are happy to see:
1) An affectionate portrait of a blended family that doesn't make a huge deal out of its nonconventionality, even as it mines it for humor.
2) A nuanced, interesting portrait of a marriage. Salon goes so far as to say it "ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history."
3) That marriage is a lesbian marriage. That is also sexual in addition to being domestic! By the way, it doesn't look like that little kiss will "turn" Julianne Moore, although we'd totally buy her giving it a shot under the circumstances.
4) Those lesbians are of a certain age! And the actresses playing them get complex, funny roles.
6) All this and it looks fun! And funny!
List of better-known quantities we are nonetheless always happy to see:
1) Julianne Moore and Annette Bening's supreme acting chops.
2) Mark Ruffalo and his hotness
More like this please.
Related: Sundance, "The Kids Are All Right": Scenes From A Lesbian Marriage [Salon]
DISCUSSION
As the daughter of a happily married lesbian couple, I am super excited to see my "alternative family" portrayed in a positive and realistic light with out the campy "hey look at these wacky gay folks raise a kid" a la Birdcage (one of my favorite movies).
I read about this earlier on different website and a lot of the comments were surprisingly negative. Some mumbo jumbo about exploiting cliches and flannel(?) as well as your run of the mill "gays shouldn't have kids" garbage.
Yeah, one of my moms is a mechanic and yep, she wears a ton of flannel and my other mom is a granola crunching activist hippie...honestly, the lesbian cliches are too many to count but we're one of the most normal/functioning families I've encountered. I'm glad that after 29 years my parents can sit in a (le gasp!) church pew without garnering any negative attention because films like this are helping folks understand that gay/straight/single all parents share a common goal; raising well-adjusted happy children.
And yep, I even have a wacky relationship w/ my bio-dad, a physics professor who plays a mean jazz flute. I wish I was joking about that last sentence.
To wrap up and accidentally long winded comment...my bio-dad also looks eerily similar to Mark Ruffalo.