Last night, here in San Diego, I was invited to a screening of The Kids Are All Right. I know there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the movie and a whole lot PR to go along with it, but, for some reason, I’d been quietly avoiding seeing it. Maybe it was the trailer that, to my mind, made the plot — a lesbian couple, their sperm donor, and the kids who just gotta meet him — a little too sitcom-y. Or the idea of using a gay couple to freshen up an overly-familiar premise that seemed both too precious, politically convenient, and probably insulting. But, after speaking briefly with an ex-boyfriend about Kids, I decided, “Eh, I’ll go.”
Please trust me when I say that I could not have been more wrong about this movie. This brilliant film offers a funny, complex, and nearly overwhelmingly realistic look not just at one gay family, but all families and the relationships that build and bind them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like The Kids Are All Right. Truly, I don’t know of another movie where I’ve had to employ, while laughing, the horror movie watch-through-the-fingers technique just to watch a family quietly eat dinner.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 by AKA William