Is The Kids Are All Right the new normal?

Editor's note:: In The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholondenko's acclaimed dramedy, Annette Bening and Julianne Moore play a gay couple whose safe suburban world is put into turmoil when their teenage children seek out the sperm donor their mothers used to create them.

While some are up in arms about the film calling it anti-heterosexual, most critics and the film's growing audience see it as an example of the new normal. As for those who made it, politics had nothing to do with it, which only adds to its normality. EDGE's Tony Phillips spoke to actors Mark Ruffalo (who plays the sperm donor) and Moore, as well as Cholondenko and her co-screenwriter Stuart Blumberg about the characters, the film and their agenda (not).

Go-to Bohunk

Is it pretty goddamn brotastic to assume the mantle of go-to Bohunk for the lesbian cineaste?

That was the question posed to Mark Ruffalo at a recent Manhattan press conference for Lisa Cholodenko's double mommies meet sperm donor comedy The Kids Are All Right. Ruffalo has done more than his share to earn that elusive title, donning the "cock sock" as the handlebar-mustachioed lothario of Jane Campion's 2003's potboiler In The Cut, and now, as the motorcycle-riding, "donor dad" in Cholodenko's now controversial film. (More on the controversy below.)�

But before the tousle-haired Ruffalo can sink his teeth into the question, he needs to do a little course correction. "Jane is totally straight," he says of his In The Cut director. "Oh, yeah, she's like a teenage girl straight. She's real straight." Okay, point taken. A handful of Victorian heroines and pigtails at a junket does not a lesbian make. Not so his latest helmer, Lisa Cholodenko. "She's been through a lot just by nature of being gay herself and having a family," Ruffalo explains. "Today, it's probably much different than it was for her to come up, so she has a real open, compassionate nature to her. I think she's a pretty healthy individual."�

But not so actualized that she gave the 42-year-old actor a pass. "She's a really gutsy and disciplined filmmaker," Ruffalo explains, "in her inception of a movie, she really lets people be who they are. She doesn't have much of an agenda about her characters. She really does like character-driven movies. And she loves her actors. She creates a space for her actors be really free. I was surprised by how free she let us be, but also always keeping a strong hand on the direction, which is an interesting balance. It's like holding an actor by the neck, but with only one hand."�

And the rest of his anatomy? "I do know that the ratings board was giving us an X rating for one too many thrusts in the sex scenes," Ruffalo says of his initial quickie tease of a sex scene with co-star Yaya DaCosta, followed by a much more extended scene opposite Julianne Moore. "I don't understand what the difference is between eight thrusts and six thrusts," Ruffalo continues, "but that's literally what it came down to." And any typecasting, or websites, that may follow this, his third in a series of deliciously graphic on-screen trysts? "Hey, man, bring it on," is his super-casual response. "My market share, if that opens it up, I'll be the Bohunk for lesbians. I'm half a lesbian myself."�

Ruffalo will balance out all that estrogen as he's just signed to star in Glee-helmer Ryan Murphy's adaptation of Larry Kramer's autobiographical AIDS play The Normal Heart, which has been slouching towards the big screen for decades now. Still, along the Hollywood food chain, he's inclined to agree that he's willing to get more naked than most actors. "I definitely have done my share," he says, "if you're talking about nudity and sex stuff, I've overplayed that hand. I really look at myself and I'm cringing, trying got keep my hands over my wife's eyes while we're watching it and thinking, I can't get away with this much longer. It's just happens that really great parts you have to get naked, and that's when they open up to me because no other guy in Hollywood will do it."�

Are the kids all right?

For Cholodenko, Ruffalo's casting was much more nuanced than will he or won't he doff the motorcycle gear and go full monty. Mainly because the 46-year-old director, who penned the Kids script with co-writer Stuart Blumberg, still finds Paul, Ruffalo's character. "icky." She likens creating his character to "some real brain surgery for us. It was very easy to stop short of making him sympathetic. You have to dig the deeper recesses to find the pieces that are redeemable: where that person is broken or empty or in need of repair. We just kept pushing and pushing until we were like, okay, we get him, he's the right balance of sympathetic and schmucky, and that took some time."

Co-writer Blumberg also sees the stickiness of Ruffalo's character Paul. The swinging sperm donor resurfaces years later when his progeny hit their teens and seek him out behind the backs of their two gay moms, played by an on-screen pair (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) with seven Academy Award nominations between them.

Did Blumberg's status as one of the only other straight males on-set ever put him in the position of advocating for Paul?�

"Both Lisa and I struggled with it," Blumberg admits, "we really wanted people to not hate Paul. We wanted to see him for all of his glory, warts and all, but we tried things where there was a reconciliation at the end. It just felt false."

The script, as it stands, has Ruffalo being kicked to the curb in a way that would definitely raise hackles if the script were flipped and it were two gay men treating a female surrogate so poorly. "We felt that's actually what would have happened," Blumberg explains, "after the movie is over, the audience can imagine what happens if he makes another overture and what does he do to change his life? We both really advocated for Paul to be true, to be likable and to be flawed."�

Since opening to mostly positive reviews, the film recorded the highest per screen average of any film so far this year: $$72,127 at seven theaters in urban centers last weekend. Expanding to 27 screens this past weekend, it grossed a cool million with a per screen average of $27,026. But, as reported on this web site on Friday, reaction has set in amongst conservatives who see the film as an agenda-driven drama with the heterosexual (Paul) demonized as the heavy. In her July 15, 2010 column in the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser wrote: "Hollywood is having a teaching moment--this time in the bedroom, where, if you're straight, chances are you've been doing it wrong," She went on and compared The Kids Are All Right to Forrest Gump and Brokeback Mountain, calling it a "self-righteously moralistic movie" that depicts males as "corrupt, amoral horndogs."

Later she quoted a therapist who saw fit to preface her response with the phrase, "I'm not anti-gay." Adding, "But I don't think you can compensate for the male-female role model."

In his Weekly Standard review John Podhoretz writes that the film shows that "Gay relationships can be just as tiresome as straight relationships, if not more so." And claims: "The theme running through Cholodenko's work is that there is no 'normal,' and that efforts to confine people to conventional categories are counterproductive and soul-killing. It's that whole Walt Whitman 'I contain multitudes' affect, and it helps explain her insistence on including the offputting details and dialogue."

Another reviewer - Dan Gifford from Big Hollywood - got right to the point in the title of his review: "The Kids Are All Right' Tells Us We Don't Need Fathers." The film (he writes) is "essentially selling a lite version of the leftist utopian political fantasy of not needing men and rejecting male patriarchy." He later goes on to conflate studies that say that children of lesbian parents fared better than their peers from heterosexual households, citing accusations that the study had been "funded by several lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender advocacy groups," and throwing out the claim that "the political left dominates all media, even the scientific media," and quipping, "So, maybe the kids aren't all right."

Moore :: a goldmine

With comments such as these you might think the film was developed in some LGBT thinktank, but in actuality touch-and-go financing and Cholodenko's pregnancy led to a pre-production period that sprawled over five years. Blumberg likens it to a marriage, albeit one that is as complicated as Benning and Moore's on-screen union.

"It was good," Blumberg says of the collaboration, "we're very close now. We had to sit each other down at times and just vent. We loved each other. We would get tired and take naps together. It was a really respectful, but goading creative process where we both pushed each other to see how rich we could make it."�

Moore is of the opinion that they hit the goldmine. She was attached for most of that five year period, waiting around like the de facto mistress to their marriage, although given what Blumberg calls Moore's "pansexual" appeal, it's difficult to discern just whose paramour Moore actually was. Pursuit-wise, Cholodenko wins hands-down. The 49-year-old mother of two has been chasing Cholodenko's skirt as least since her breakout, 1998 feature High Art. The two met after Moore enquired why she hadn't seen that script and over the years, she implored Cholodenko to write something specifically for her.�

At first, working for a lesbian director seems like a change-up for Moore, who famously played muse to gay male directors like Todd Haynes, Stephen Daldry and Tom Ford over the course of her storied career. Moore is quick to point out her many lesbian roles, too. "The Hours, Pippa Lee, Chloe," Moore recites, cataloging her same-sex entanglements on screen. When asked if she's turned down any lesbian roles, she laughs, "No, I've taken them all."�

But is there a difference for Moore when it's Lisa Cholodenko, not Tom Ford, sitting in the director's chair? "Aside from the boobs," she cracks, "no. Men, women, gay, straight, it's all pretty much the same. You're dealing with an individual and the story they want to tell." And this is where the white-washing of The Kids Are All Right begins. It's a stealth naivet� that resists political allegory so staunchly that it would almost have to be political. Everyone interviewed for the film spins some kind of variation on Moore's people are people theme.
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"I mean, ya know, I don't know," is how she explains what her character's lesbianism means bigger picture, "everything and nothing, really. It's not any different than any other family. It's a portrait of a middle-aged marriage, a family in transition, and how much we value it, how important it is in our lives. In terms of them being lesbians, the most interesting thing is that it's not commented on. Films, rather than influence popular culture, reflect it. So the fact that we have a movie like this means this is an ordinary American family. We're seeing this all over the United States right now so that in and of itself is something."�

An apolitical film?

But can icing over the lesbian Bundt cake to make it more palpable to straights really result in political progress? Everyone insists the film is apolitical, as if artists are capable of such a feat. Moore even quotes Brit novelist and Granta hot young thing Zadie Smith, whose book on criticism Moore just finished reading. In one of the chapters, Smith discusses Steven Spielberg, who is often dismissed as a family filmmaker. Moore relays Smith take being "as if family wasn't the major narrative in people's lives." It's a statement that rings true for Moore, regardless of a character's sexual orientation. "It's a really great statement," she says. "There's so much to mine in family and marriage and relationships. I mean, that's really it. That's really all we do, aside from go to work."�

Perhaps, but doesn't this key player in the new queer cinema every get nostalgic for the infancy of that movement, when things were a bit more militant? "In my life, I know plenty of gay families with two dads and two moms," Moore says, "and let me tell ya, the dynamic is not any different." For her, it's not antithetical to the home life she has in common with her co-star Annette Benning, "We've both been in long term relationships and we're both parents," Moore explains. "She has four kids, I have two, so this is not a paradigm that's unfamiliar to us. We're living it everyday."�

As is Cholodenko, although she's in no rush to screen her latest for her own son, Calder. "I haven't watched it with my four-year-old," she deadpans, "but I have watched it with my girlfriend several times." Is there anything in the film that sets off the seismic shocks her on-screen couple endures? "No, no," she replies, adding that her girlfriend is a really good laugher and gets most of the film's comedy. "I need to clone her and plant her in all the audiences," Cholodenko continues. "She thinks this is the best thing that's ever happened. She's had a great time with the film."�

As for the rest of her family, Cholodenko says, "They'll watch it later." She does see the film as a way to project into her own future, when she may be packing off her own kids for university. "This deals with teenagers, kids going off to college and stuff, so that just became a fantasy meditation on a theme." Some of it was a little closer to home. "The theme of using a sperm donor and being in a committed relationship with a woman and building a family and making those commitments definitely comes from a personal place," she adds.�

There is a theory around the film, one that's even floated in its press kit, that because Moore was attached for such a long time, her part was written expressly with her in mind, but the other character in the couple, Nic, the role Annette Benning eventually landed, remained a question mark during the writing process, thereby allowing Cholodenko to easily insert herself into the part of the uptight, bread-winning doctor. Cholodenko doesn't necessarily agree. "I would say there's pieces of myself in all of these characters," she begins, "and certainly in those two women." But she also has to allow for there being parts of her heterosexual male co-writer in the mix as well. "There's probably pieces of our moms in there, and what not," she continues. "I definitely identify with things that the Nic character does. And things that Annette Benning brings to it, but it wasn't some portrait of myself."�

So at the end of the day, what is The Kids Are All Right a portrait of?

"It was really just the focus on the inner life of these characters," Cholodenko explains, "being really clear about all their dimensions and their dilemmas and giving each one of them an arc -- a place to begin and a journey to go through -- and that's not an easy thing to do with five characters. You have them interwoven in a way that there's a lot of cause and effect."

And that weave makes Cholodenko most proud. "We kind of pulled that off," she says, "and the issue of gay family, or anything that could be reduced to hand-wringing, just went away. There's really not anything to hand-wring about. What you're hand-ringing over is whether she's going to run off with him? Or are they going to stay together? Or is the kid going to come in with a gun and kill the mom? I'm kidding, but we really focused on themes that anybody could project themselves into."