The Kids Are All Right feels like a script leftover from the 1970s, which is surprising given its attempt to show a “modern” family. Julianne Moore and Annette Bening play Jules and Nic, a lesbian couple who have spent their adult lives building a home, a family, and a decidedly normal existence for themselves. We know this right from the start: the family is seated around the dinner table, and Nic (Bening) nags her daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska) about sending off thank-you cards, warning that if she waits, she’ll have to face the awkwardness of starting the thank-you with an apology. They also have a no-cellphones-at-the-table rule, eat with proper table manners, and function in an expressly healthy and normal manner. We have everything but an intertitle that reads NORMAL FAMILY! And then, just to show us that the film isn’t entirely square, we get a scene of Nic going down on Jules while watching gay porn. Which, of course, is played for laughs, not titillation.

Nic and Jules find their blissful normalcy interrupted when their daughter Joni, now eighteen, is pressured by her fifteen-year-old brother (Josh Hutcherson) into locating their biological father. The pair go behind moms’ backs and meet up with their father, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), at his organic restaurant, and have an appropriately awkward lunch together. The brother, Laser, finds Paul’s laid-back routine threatening and decides he’s not impressed, while his sister Joni has quite the opposite reaction: a platonic crush on her newfound father figure.

But the tension really begins when the lunch meeting is discovered by Jules and Nic, and Paul becomes an open friend of the family. It’s during these scenes with Moore and Bening at the table that hold the film together. Julianne Moore plays Jules as a flower child with low self-esteem, bouncing from one project to another, but lacking the follow-through needed to sustain a business. Nic is the opposite, and Annette Bening plays her as a domineering perfectionist, frustrated by the control she’s losing over her family, finding comfort in one-liners and bottles of wine. Paul (Ruffalo), despite being patient and nice, is nonetheless viewed as an antagonist to Nic, who (correctly) suspects he might be trying to move in on her territory, and a short-lived love triangle emerges in the second act, to be resolved in the third.

The Kids Are All Right is less about the kids than their parents, and less about the parents than the performances by the two lead actresses. Annette Bening is deliciously repressed, as usual, and Julianne Moore captures the midlife crisis of a woman who has spent her entire life avoiding crises. Mia Wasikowska (recently Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland) and Josh Hutcherson (Journey to the Center of the Earth) give realistic, likeable performances, and Mark Ruffalo, as the straight interloper, is decent, if interchangeable with any number of male leads. The reality of the performances help to keep viewers entertained, even as the script takes odd and negligent turns. The affair between Moore and Ruffalo seems, well, out of a movie, and the film looses direction in its last twenty minutes or so, switching focus from the love triangle to daughter Joni’s move-in day at college. There are also several unresolved plot threads – a teenage crush of Joni’s that’s built up, built up, and then disappears; Laser’s subplot disappears midway through the film and the boy is pretty much forgotten – and individual scenes are generally structured better than the whole. We get nice moments, but not the mounting pathos of a drama.

But, again, it’s the performances by Moore and Bening that save the film from being complete fluff. They invest into Jules and Nic the ticks and quirks of a real couple, and, because we believe they’ve spent twenty normal years together, we feel something might be lost when their relationship is threatened. The script may be too safe, choosing to show a normal family rather than an interesting one, but the actors ensure you'll be entertained and occasionally charmed by their neo-nuclear family. Just don't expect to be blown away.