Critics are finding few flaws with the
Julianne Moore-Annette Bening lesbian moms flick The Kids Are
Alright.
The veteran actresses star as a lesbian
couple struggling to keep their family together in the comedy-drama
which opened in select cities Friday.
“Approaches perfection,” said
USA Today.
The
Kids Are Alright “is so canny in its insights and so
agile in its negotiation of complex emotions that it deserves to
stand on its own,” wrote
the New York Times.
Reviewers say the film does a great job
at presenting gay parents as nothing unusual, gay marriage as an
accepted norm and gay families as everyday folks.
“Nic [played by Bening] and Jules
[Moore], a couple with two children, a Volvo and a tidy, spacious
house in a pleasant suburban stretch in Southern California, are a
picture of normalcy,” A. O. Scott writes at the Times.
That picture perfect life is threatened
when their teenage children seek out Paul (played by 42-year-old Mark
Ruffalo), their biological father, whose anonymously donated sperm
impregnated the women.
Reviewers are feeling what the film's
director/co-writer Lisa Cholodenko had hoped for: normalcy.
“There are these families in every
city across the land,” Cholodenko said in an interview with
Screencrave.com.
“It is not so rarefied, it's not so special, and at the end of the
day everyone has the same issues and problems. Marriages endure the
same ups and downs and kids have to break away from their families
and their parents, you know, go off to college.”