Day 63: The Kids Are All Right

A tense family life leads to cheating and heartbreak (for me as much as anyone in the film, I’m sure). Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) have been together for over 18 years and the cracks are starting to show. They’ve got two great kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), who decide they want to get in touch with their biological father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). The introduction of this new person into an already shaky family makes tensions reach boiling point and people end up being bastards. Heads up, this whole blog is basically me ranting about cheating. My advice is to skip this one.

Nic and Jules are constantly sniping and undermining each other all the time. Jules doesn’t feel like she is appreciated anymore and Nic feels under strain because she is financially caring for the whole family. It all gets massively worse when Paul is thrown into the mix. He’s easy going which serves to rile Nic at every point. Not helping matters is that everyone else seems to love him and they are all spending time with him and bonding. She feels like everything is slipping away so she tries really hard to connect with him. Eventually she manages it and it’s a really sweet moment with them singing a Joni Mitchell song at the table but then it’s totally ruined because of her discovery that Jules has been fucking him. My notes are just incoherent ramblings filled with swearing so I can’t remember specifics all too well but I take from that that I was incensed.

Jules bitches about Nic to Paul which pissed me off so much, you can’t be unloading the private problems of your marriage on him after you’ve kissed him. Not allowed. And then she says she loves Nic but then goes right ahead and fucks Paul anyway. There’s not a single part of me that thinks you can love someone and cheat on them. I just do not believe that it’s possible. Her ‘apology speech’ drove me mad as well, when she said “Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most and I don’t know why.” Because people are selfish, that's why. There is no deeper, existential meaning there; people are selfish bastards and they will fuck you over when they want. I completely understand that Jules felt unappreciated at home, and that is horrible. But fucking some guy isn’t going to fix those problems, yeah you’ll feel appreciated in the moment you’re with him but you still have to go home to your problems, they’ve not gone anywhere because you haven’t dealt with them. You’ve created another problem now on top of all the ones you had before, and this problem is going to devastate the person you’re claiming to love. The way she said the line was as if she had no control over what she was doing, that hurting the people you love is just how it goes. She had a choice, there was a moment (in fact there were several, considering she fucked him a lot) when she could’ve said, ‘No, I’ll not cheat on my wife and ruin my kid’s chance at getting to know their biological father’ and she ignored it and went right on ahead with it. You can apologise all you want but the fact you willingly went ahead with it, knowing that Nic was going to be hurt is inexcusable. For me, anyway. In the film it looks like they’re going to try and work through it. That takes a stronger person than me, I just couldn't do it. Wouldn’t matter how long we’d been together or if we had kids or whatever, cheating is my ultimate dealbreaker. I don’t think I’d even fight about it with my person either, I’d just leave. It just drives me mad, I don’t understand it at all.

Somewhere in the film I couldn’t think about how awful it was that their family was being pulled apart so I went to my happy place. Mark Ruffalo was there, obviously. And it was just calm and there was no cheating or awkward sex (seriously, all of the sex scenes are just the most uncomfortable, man alive). He’s such a babe. You’ll need to go to your happy place when watching the film as well. It is really the only way to get through the sadness and awkward sex. In fact I’m sure that’s how like 90% of marriages work.

7/10