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It sure is fun to watch decently-written comic dialogue performed by movie stars.

That was the thought that popped into my head about ten minutes in to The Kids Are Alright, the Lisa Cholodenko film that touched off a bidding war here and was eventually purchased by Focus Features. It was the same thought that popped into my head about five minutes into It's Complicated, Nancy Meyers' latest romcom for ladies "of a certain age" to love, and for film critics to poop on. Between Hollywood's tentpole mania and the fall of most of the studio-dependent labels willing and able to make a film like this, we're all so starved for the pleasures of an old-fashioned, glossy grown-up movie that here at Sundance, Kids was greeted like a revelation. But even if we're all okay with base competency being something to celebrate, Cholodenko's film is less worthy of such accolades than the latest trifle from the much-despised Meyers. It's less entertaining. It's less accurate as a portrait of adult sexuality. It's less honest. It's less than.   



Like It's Complicated, The Kids are Alright begins as a sex farce about middle-aged rich people, and then attempts to evolve into a drama about the responsibilities of age and family ties. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening star as Jules and Nic, a lesbian couple who have been together for twenty years, living in a nice Los Angeles house and raising two children produced via artificial insemination with donated sperm. When their daughter Joni turns 18, she and her brother Laser (one of the "jokes" of the film is that although the derivation of the daughter's relatively normal name is explained, her brother's crazy "progressive" moniker isn't) hunt down their biological father.

He turns out to be Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the graying alterna-stud owner of a hot organic restaurant -- essentially the Dave Navarro of the slow food movement. Paul and the kids bond quickly, much to the consternation of Nic, a drinky doctor and bitchy control freak. The less-skeptical Jules, a hippie and a bit of a ditz, cautiously agrees to plant a garden Jack's backyard. Soon he's, uh, planting seeds in Jules's own, uh, garden, which Nic has been too self-absorbed to properly, uh, tend to herself.

Cholodenko's film begs to be described with such wink-wink double entendre. As in her previous film, Laurel Canyon, the writer/director sets up an encounter between intense sexuality repressed (Jules) and the tawdry opposite extreme (Paul). But where the earlier film explored the slipperiness of desire without moral judgment or finite conclusions (and actually made sex seem sexy), Kids offers cartoon carnality ("Oh, well! Hello!" Jules says when first seeing Paul's penis) resulting in punishment that feels excessive and false.

It becomes very clear very early on that despite this couple's basic incompatibility, Cholodenko is making a film about a gay marriage surviving the threat of heterosexual seduction, and so Jules and Nic must stay together no matter what -- even if that means never working out their fundamental personality clash, even if it means blaming the straight guy for the infidelity while letting far from perfect partner Nic off the hook. It may be progressive enough for some that a film should even exist in which a lifelong lesbian domestic partnership is subject to the same unearned happy ending that we'd see in a regular Hollywood movie about a traditional man-woman marriage. But the fact remains that in this film, family values are disingenuously given primacy over emotional realities.

The people who are championing this film must be so swept up in its now too-rare basic appeal (entertainment - how novel!) that they can't really see it for what it is. Beyond the trappings of NPR liberalism, The Kids Are Alright is extremely conservative.