Writer-director Lisa Cholodenko has scored one of the few major crossover hits of the summer with “The Kids Are All Right” which moved from limited art house release to a fairly wide multiplex opening on Friday.
The success of the movie, about a lesbian couple raising two teens in Southern California, is a reflection of both the high quality of the film and an underserved adult moviegoing audience starved for something substantial in the dog days of summer.
“Kids” is the sort of solidly written, directed and acted domestic comedy-drama that would have been produced by a major studio in the 1970s or 1980s, but has been relegated to the indie niche because mainstream Hollywood has given the summer months over to action films and comedies aimed at kids and teens.
You could practically hear the older audience sighing with pleasure at the “Kids” screening I attended over the weekend.
The movie is intelligent, as beautifully constructed as a classic play, and gives two of our finest actresses — Annette Bening and Julianne Moore — the chance to dig into the sort of meaty, funny starring roles that they would never find in an expensive Hollywood picture.
Bening is 52 and Moore is 49 and one of the most refreshing things about “Kids” is that these women have both opted to look their ages in the film (and Cholodenko seems to have eschewed the make-up and glossy lighting that might “protect” her stars).
Those of us who go to lots of foreign films are used to seeing “real” women of all types in French and Italian and British movies. The middle-aged beauties in those movies — the French stars Nathalie Baye and Isabelle Huppert and a new favorite of mine, the Italian actress Margherita Buy — connect with their characters (and with us) because they don’t look like the mannequins we see in too many American films and TV shows.
One of the main themes in “Kids” is the way that any marriage — straight or gay — is tested by the passage of time, especially the challenge of finding an aging partner sexually arousing after two or three decades.
Bening and Moore are still beautiful women, to be sure, but their faces and their bodies look like those of people we know rather than rich folk living in Los Angeles.
