THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT

Madeleine’s moved to see the title on the marquee, mixed matter-of-factly with the rest. Part two of a double, and while Schmucks is slick, soundstage sets and ordinary actors, this is California spun-gold late afternoons and the most beautiful people in America wearing more leather bracelets than seems anatomically possible. They sure like those out there. But I mean, Julianne Moore, that Vanya, you watch and think, yes, when she leaves at the end, the vacuum in her wake quite literally destroys their lives.

As for Ruffalo, fuck, that hair, that lippy grin, and two or three truly excellent plaid shirts (from his own closet I’d bet). A voice somehow soft and gruff speaks the sentences he lets trail off. It’s partly about how wily this new breed of straight guy is, “groovy and together,” a good listener, earthy and laid-back, he eats a tomato like an apple and owns an organic/local restaurant called WYSIWYG. Indeed. Bening as bitch, again, but wow, that dinner shot. The only film I’ve seen with the word “interloper” in it, the only one in which “Desire is counterintuitive” can be a line. Spoiler alert: adultery. Spoiler alert: the end of James Dickey’s poem “Adultery” reads, “Guilt is magical.” Moral alert: a family is a family is a family—not the worst takeaway, so lower your hackles everyone.

Alice! She goes to college, in the end. How great was that day they dropped you off? A gorgeous film, I say again, all the desire we live for looking so late-afternoon, looking like that white sunlight coming through the interstices of a dark-green hedge, a few simple tables and chairs in a yard of chalky gravel, some food just out of the ground or off the vine that morning beside a glass of long-tended, long-waiting wine. Could that sort of loveliness be a set? And do we want the actors, the language, the wine, to dazzle us further, to take us higher and higher still, into an oblivion of bliss—or do we want them to stop? The Russian winter sneaking up, she leaves the estate, and think of what Vanya and the rest do when they’re bereft: they do the books.