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Annette Bening and Julianne Moore in a scene from Lisa Choldenko's The Kids Are All Right. Photo credit: Suzanne Tenner. Studio: Focus Features
I am proud to say that I was a hard sell for The Kids Are All Right, the family comedy-drama starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore and opening in limited release on July 9th. A mainstream film featuring a lesbian-headed family?! And the leads are among two of the finest actors working right now? With seven Oscar nominations between 'em? Oh you betcha I’m there. But I’m there with both expectations and hackles raised.
The attitude I bring to the movie theater approximates what you might bring to the living room in which your daughter's prom date sits. Hopefully nervously.
Picture your kid, a sweet tender thing you’ve dedicated the last decade and a half to protecting and promoting, who deserves the best, or at least a fair shake, goddamn it. And then there's the date, a Usual Suspect with a history of stringing folks along and then breaking their hearts, or worse. The sweet tender thing in this construction, though, is me and my people: lesbians, even more specifically, lesbian-headed families, and the kids in them. The prom date I’m looking askance at? Commercial Hollywood film.
I have a right to be squinty-eyed. For most of my movie-going life, commercial Hollywood film has left me and mine either ignored along the walls surrounding the dance floor, quietly convincing ourselves of our worth despite the lack of attention, or attended to for just a moment, only to be betrayed in the next, accidentally or even maliciously.
I will never forget sitting, or rather eventually slinking down lower and lower in my seat, in a suburban Minneapolis movie theater watching Basic Instinct in the early 1990s. A mainstream Hollywood movie that had a lesbian in it! Plus a bisexual woman! I had to go, and took with me my gal sweetie, a friend, and her gal sweetie. The overwhelmingly heterosexual crowd watched placidly as blood splattered the screen in the opening scene, and then – I’m not making this up – later groaned and called out in disgust when Sharon Stone kisses her female lover. For Michael Douglass’ benefit. Which lover, to no one’s surprise, turns out to be a homicidal, suicidal, man-hating basket case.
Things were only a tad better in the mid-1990s romantic comedy Chasing Amy. Again, I was lured to the theater with the hopes that somehow, something resembling “our” truths would win out over “their” fantasies about us. Turned out, not so much. Ben Affleck made his big screen debut playing – surprise! – the handsome, charming guy who turns the heretofore disgruntled lesbian gal happy and straight. I’m oversimplifying just a tad here, but not much. I remember spending about 45 minutes after the movie trying to explain to an open-minded-yet-ignorant straight guy chum just what in the Sam Hill was wrong with all that.
Yes, there have been finer moments for us gals in mainstream film – Bound, the noir thriller with Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon springs eagerly to mind – but the disappointments have been heavy ones. Tragedy, pathology, and disposability have figured way, way too large in our film presence thus far. If we’ve been present at all.
I offer up these highlights of my theater-going past in order to help explain the squint in my eye as I entered the theater for a sneak preview of The Kids Are All Right. The good news is that, in the ten to twenty years since I slunk down in that theater seat, interesting things have been happening to me and mine, not least of which has been that we’ve been gayby-booming big time. That, and we've been winning bits and snatches of civil rights, even if we're shoved one step back for every two steps we take forward. And some of us -- some super-smart ones at that -- have been worming our ways up through film school and the film-making industry, becoming Hollywood's best kept secret.
This, as you might have suspected, leads us directly to writer-director (and lesbian mum) Lisa Cholodenko and her new film The Kids Are All Right. You may recall Colodenko's work in the creepy but
