I knew that I would inevitably see The Kids Are All Right. The Kids Are All Right is critically acclaimed and has an outstanding cast. No one warned me that I would not enjoy The Kids Are All Right. I understand that the person who created The Kids Are All Right is actually a lesbian so her experiences are definitely more authentic than my views. Is straight-splaining a thing? If it is, then I am probably about to straight-splain. My suggestion is to skip seeing the overrated The Kids Are All Right and see Concussion (not the movie starring Will Smith, but the movie starring Robin Weigert) instead.
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The Kids Are All Right is about a family which consists of two married women, Nic, a focused, practical doctor, played by Annette Benning, who should get more work because she is my favorite part of the movie, and Jules, played by Julianne Moore, and their respective birth children who share the same sperm donor, Joni, the older sister, played by Mia Wasikowska, and Laser, the younger brother, played by Hunger Games’ Josh Hutcherson. Laser is curious about the sperm donor and does not want to wait until he is 18 to meet him so he gets his sister to do it. The Kids Are All Right depicts Paul, the sperm donor, played by Mark Ruffalo, without irony as God’s gift to women-he is in touch with his feelings, a free spirit, totally cool. All sorts of younger women, including Yaya Dacosta, the most successful acting alum of America’s Next Top Model, hurl themselves at him. The kids secretly meet the sperm donor, and they hit it off. The mothers figure out what the kids are up to and decide to meet him.
The Kids Are All Right sets up Paul as the missing necessary element in the children and Jules’ life. Soon the focus of The Kids Are All Right shifts. The children’s role in The Kids Are All Right is overshadowed by an affair between Jules and Paul. Jules initially gets professional then sexual affirmation from Paul. The Kids Are All Right makes it a showdown between who really belongs in the family’s life-Nic or Paul. Nic steps it up, and the family banishes Paul. Paul grows as a person and realizes that he wants to have a family of his own. Though the family has some bruises, everything is all right, and they are ready to grow together.
The Kids Are All Right may not be Kissing Jessica Stein, but it comes uncomfortably close to a male heterosexual fantasy of getting to sleep with a lesbian. I understand that sexuality is a spectrum, especially for women who receive less of a backlash for fluidity than men, and labels are not necessary, but Jules is not depicted as bisexual. When confronted, Jules affirms herself as a lesbian; yet she is enthusiastically engaged in heterosexual sex, not a sexual affair with another woman. I know that there are real life examples of lesbians enthusiastically in heterosexual relationships such as Chirline McCray and Mayor Bill de Blasio so that is not my problem with The Kids Are All Right. There are so few mainstream depictions of lesbian relationships in the media that it is somewhat horrifying that even a film devoted to a married lesbian couple is more comfortable with reverting to a heterosexual pairing as soon as possible.
In addition, I often hear heterosexuals ask who is the man or the woman in a same sex relationship or don’t the children need a mother/father, i.e. whatever gender the same sex couple isn’t. Such comments make me cringe. I was always under the impression that if the same sex couple consisted of women then they were both women, and one was not “the man.” When the same sex couple consisted of men then they were both men, and one was not the woman. I get particularly defensive because I usually hear gay men referred to as if they are less than men because of their sexuality. Yet The Kids Are All Right seems to categorize Nic as the man by making her the financial provider, the disciplinarian and ultimately the one that can be replaced by Paul and must confront him to prevent her displacement from the family. Ultimately Paul is the magical heterosexual and catalyst that jars the family from stagnation and helps them to grow, but The Kids Are All Right affirms a heterosexual paradigm instead of confronting it.
The Kids Are All Right seems to have a weird underlying fantasy that the sperm donor IS the right guy for you and should be the father of your children. The Kids Are All Right depicts artificial insemination in a conservative way as if the relationship of two adults giving themselves to each other is a necessary component of procreation (seemingly in line with Catholicism and Islam). I hate that The Kids Are All Right made it a choice for the children between the family or the sperm donor in order to keep the family in tact. It really does not have to be that dramatic and seems like a further stigmatization of a medical procedure. While the parents who raise you may naturally feel weird about a child reaching out to a sperm donor, the real drama should be between the kids and the sperm donor, not the sperm donor and the parents. The latter dynamic is spectacularly selfish and usurps what was supposed to be the kids’ right to have access to their biological history. The Kids Are All Right does not explore this aspect of the story.
The Kids Are All Right is also racially problematic. Just because you are a homosexual and left leaning politically does not mean that you are automatically not a little racist. DaCosta plays the Jezebel, the over-sexualized black woman who is unable to spark finer feelings in Paul. Then there is the poor Mexican gardener who is the only one doing the work that Jules wants credit for while she is sleeping with Paul. Jules casually characterizes him as a drug addict and fires him to hide her misdeeds because he knows what is up. The characters of color in The Kids Are All Right are casualties of careless people, a gag, not real people. If the creator of The Kids Are All Right intended to depict the main characters as awful people that we are not supposed to root for because they treat other people as if they exist for their comfort, then the creators succeeded, but I do not think that was the intent because we are supposed to still be sympathetic to Paul and Jules.
The Kids Are All Right just left me feeling icky. The Kids Are All Right exploited progressive demographics to further mainstream norms that actually make life more difficult for lesbians, women who want to conceive without being in a relationship with a man, people of color and progressives. Unlike The Kids Are All Right, Concussion is a much better film that tackles similar issues such as stagnation after a long-term marriage with children.