In the Name of the Mothers

There is a scene in Lisa (High Art) Cholodenko’s hit summer indie The Kids Are All Right that should – at last! – get Annette Bening her much-overdue Oscar.

Granted, the entire film is quite the showcase for the actress, and co-star Julianne Moore, but that scene...that scene is just so on point, so raw, so emotional.

It’s but a moment in an accomplished, sharp-witted 104-minute observation of a thoroughly modern-day relationship, and such a timeless one at that, for it is rooted in the most real of emotions: heartbreak.

Bening plays Nic, one half of a lesbian couple (of a certain age), a doctor. Moore plays her other half, Jules, the more free-spirited one of the two.

Together they have to teenaged children conceived via artificial insemination, Joni (Alice in Wonderland’s Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Jost Hutcherson), who talks his sister, who is 18, into looking up their sperm donor before leaving for college.

A bit reluctant to do so because she doesn’t know how their moms will react, Joni eventually agrees to the task, and so into their lives comes Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a confronting, irresistible, new sorta guy who topsy-turvies everything for Nic and Jules and the kids.

Rent the film, which is out on DVD today, and find out exactly what happens, and see it all unfold knowing that this story is, perhaps, the most genuine of its kind you will see all year. There’s no pretense about the message Cholodenko is sending – love is love, not matter who you love, and if there is love between two people, then they are not all that quote, unquote different. And because of Bening, natch, who will knock your socks off in that scene.

Photo: Focus Features.