The Kids Are All Right: So much better than Anthony Lane would have us believe.

So I’m behind on my New Yorker reading. And behind on my movie-going. Last week, both schedules miraculously came into perfect alignment when a day or so after I finally saw Lisa Cholodenko’s marvelous film, The Kids All All Right, I read Anthony Lane’s embarrassingly biased review.

I generally shy away from reviewing reviewers (or critics, as they prefer to be called) on this site because, let’s face it, we do an awful lot of it over coffee or cocktails. Don’t we?

But this silliness, I just can’t let stand.

He’s reviewing an excellent film and in many cases finding it praiseworthy yet insisting in line after line that much of what is on the screen happened by accident or in spite of Cholodenko’s intentions. Here is one of his best lines on that score:

The California that we get in this film is a greener, gayer update of the California that Woody Allen took such perfect potshots at, more than thirty years ago in ‘Annie Hall’ the difference being that Cholodenko doesn’t always know it’s funny.

Really? How does Anthony Lane know what Lisa Cholodenko does or does not know about her own film? I’m sorry but I find it hard to imagine a male critic expressing a similar sentiment about the work of a male director. Don’t you? This feels gender-biased to me.

And here's another doosey:

...so, by an irony that Cholodenko may not fully have intended, the climax of 'The Kids Are All Right' grows suddenly humorless, and close to vengeful, in its moralizing glare.

Generally speaking, I think it’s safe to assume that most moments, elements, subtexts and details of a film have been seen and understood by its director. Such is the nature of filmmaking. To suggest otherwise only reveals the ignorance of the critic.

I don’t know Lisa Cholodenko but I have heard her speak on more than one occasion and she seems sharp as a tack, as far as I can tell.

What’s perhaps most annoying about this review is the way Lane critiques the dialogue, falling into the kind of trap one would expect from a rookie, not from someone with the tenure of Anthony Lane of The New Yorker! He conflates the voices of Cholodenko’s characters with Cholodenko’s own voice. Again, not giving her her due credit for having the skill and ear to have consciously chosen the dialogue that comes from the mouths of these characters.

Here’s a passage that made me groan:

… do the screenwriters not realize that half of the women’s conversation—‘We just talked conceptually,’ ‘It hasn’t risen to the point of consciousness for you,’ ‘It’s so indigenous!’—is pure, extra-planetary prattling and nothing but? The prattle turns chronic when Jules, who fancies herself as a landscape designer, is hired by Paul to reshape his backyard; she suggests ‘a trellisy, hidden garden kind of thing,’ or, alternatively, ‘you could go with the Asiany.’ I wouldn’t trust her to pick a rose.

Exactly the point, Mr. Lane. It never ceases to amaze me at some critics’ capacity for zeroing in on a film or a play’s greatest strength and describing it as a liability. The characters in The Kids Are All Right each speak in their own completely authentic and fully-realized voice. That is so hard to do. Cholodenko and her screenwriting partner Stuart Blumberg deserve major praise for this. Not sneering. Oy!

Reading that review made me want to run back to the cinema to see the film again so I might cleanse myself of all the negative misinterpretation of what is without question one of the best written, best directed and best acted films I’ve seen in a very long time.