by bill biss
The Kids Are All Right, directed by Lisa Cholodenka with a screenplay by Cholodenka and Stuart Blumberg, takes a realistic, poignant and humorous look at a modern family in Southern California.
Annette Bening and Julianne Moore portray two lesbian parents Nic and Jules, respectively. Their children [Mia Wasikowska and Josh Hutcherson] discover their biological father played by Mark Ruffalo.
What ensues in the process tests the strength of the moms’ relationship after 20 years of life together as partners and raising a family. The film is brilliantly acted with a vibrant screenplay and is a fresh alternative to the current summer’s blockbuster crop of films.
The Rage Monthly had the opportunity to sit down with Julianne Moore in Beverly Hills recently to discover more about this unique film experience and her thoughts on creating a very human and true-to-life role in The Kids Are All Right, opening on July 9.
Julianne Moore met Director Lisa Cholodenka several years back at a women-in-film luncheon. Moore told Cholodenka how much she loved her movies such as Laurel Canyon and High Art.
Moore asked her at the time, “Why hadn’t I seen the script to High Art? Seriously! I never saw that script.” Laughing, Cholodenka and Moore stayed in touch and the director sent Moore the script for “Kids.”
The actress signed on for the film about five years ago. In the interim, Cholodenka had a baby through artificial insemination from a sperm donor and gathered the financing for this film.
Moore adds, “I probably would have done anything she sent me honestly. One thing that was interesting about the script is from the time she gave it to me to the time we did it…it evolved. It got better, better and better.
It was always a great project and it got progressively more interesting. I love her movies so much because they really are about the way that we fall in love with each other, how we communicate and the nature of relationships. It’s about what people mean to each other and how they try to connect.”
Without giving the plotline completely away, there are several tense and emotional scenes in The Kids Are All Right. There is a pivotal scene where Julianne Moore’s character Jules apologizes to her family at one point.
Moore explains her acting motivation in regards to this speech in the film, “I love that speech. That’s a great speech. I can remember when I got the draft of the script that had that in there.
I emailed Lisa and told her that it’s just great. It’s just wonderful. Tonally, it’s interesting too because you can’t hit something like that over the head. It’s comedic and it’s emotional. That’s kind of my favorite kind of thing to see and to do too.
I think we are inadvertently funny in moments of huge emotion. People tend to be. It’s wonderful because she is struggling so much with her apology. She really does mean it. She also knows it’s going to be awhile before she’s forgiven.
In movies (laughing) you always see people saying ‘I’m sorry.’ And the other person says, ‘It’s okay.’ Well….no! In real life, you say you’re sorry and you hold on for five weeks until somebody is finally like, ‘okay.’ So, I love that part of that too.”
The lesbian character of Jules is fascinating to watch in the film. Moore explains her perception of where Jules is coming from in the film and says, “ I don’t think there is anything conscious about what Jules is doing. I think she is feeling like…she’s searching.
She’s at a point where she’s freaked out about where she is in her life. Her oldest child is leaving home. Her second one is going to be leaving home in a couple of years. She’s a stay-at-home parent. All her stabs at working have kind of gone one way.
She’s trying to figure out what she wants. She makes this decision about being a landscape designer and it’s with someone who validates her, who sees her somewhat differently than people in her family see her. So, she’s like ‘Oh. Oh! I feel seen. I feel different. It’s just a connection where she feels sort of ‘seen.’”
Working with a lesbian director is no different for Moore than working with any of the other many talented directors in the evolution of her career.
She lays it on the line and brilliantly explains why. “I don’t like to be divisive about people’s gender, sexuality or race or nationality. Saying, ‘I worked for this Spanish director and it’s all like this.’ I’ve been incredibly fortunate in my career that I’ve worked with so many talented filmmakers and many gay filmmakers among them.
I’ve never found that their sexuality determined…people that I’ve worked with are telling stories. Sometimes they are extreme stories about what it is to be a human being. I’m attracted to people with that kind of sensibility whether they’re gay or straight or whatever.
The great thing about [The Kids Are All Right] is that it’s making no statement at all…it just simply is. The film allows us to see something that is occurring all over the world now. For my children, it’s a reality for them.
They know kids who have two moms or two dads. It’s not unusual. It simply is. So, hopefully it will be that way someday for the rest of the world too.”
There is a definite comedic side to Julianne Moore. This becomes apparent several times in The Kids Are All Right. She explains her love for approaching scenes with a comedic touch. “Lately, I’ve been really interested in comedy. I think that life is hard. It really, really is hard…particularly now. Also, oddly, tragedy becomes less appealing the older you get.”
On working with Annette Bening in this film, Moore talks about their acting chemistry on set. “Honestly, the thing that Annette and I have going for us is that we’ve both been married a long time and when you’ve been living a family life.
We’re both parents and have been married. We have that sensibility in common. I think it was very easy to connect that way. These women [Nic and Jules] have been together 20 years.
They have two children and a lot invested in each other. Most of the people who I know that have been together a significant amount of time have had any number of kinds of bumps along the way. A long-term relationship is rewarding and challenging.
We obviously live in pair bonds and that’s something we’re really interested in. At the end of the day, it [The Kids Are All Right] is a portrait of that and of a family. We as actors are simply trying to channel these stories about what it means to be alive.”
