The Kids Are All Right

It would be easy to imagine Lisa Chodolenko’s latest film as intolerable with another cast, but with Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and Mia Waskowska, it’s a pleasure to watch.  Compared to another recent film with a number of similarities -- Nicole Holocener’s Please Give -- I buck the critical consensus and much prefer NYC over LA in the skewering of liberal pretension and self-delusion.  Nor did I find this as surprisingly good as Chodolenko’s previous SoCal effort, Laurel Canyon.  Still, Annette is astounding and Julianne game as a lesbian couple, whose teenage children seek out their sperm donor father, in the hunky, easy-going person of Ruffalo.  While the actors take the family sitcom beyond its normal limits into realms of truth, the film remains unrealistically insular, too much a design spread in a lifestyle magazine.  If you damp down your expectations, though, this film delivers a fair measure of satisfaction.  (2010, MC-86)