1. I know the message was, "Gee, this family is just like any other!" but to make that point, the story had to be rather mundane. Imagine the movie if Nic had been male: there would be absolutely nothing to command anyone's interest. Yet virtually no changes would have to be made to accommodate the shift in gender. In ther words, the movie is boring, but because it features lesbians, it's supposed to be important, somehow. Fiddlesticks, say I.
2. I understand the writer/director is herself gay, but that didn't stop her from seeming to endorse one of the more annoying stereotypes about lesbians: that really they all just need a good, hard seeing-to. The male homosexual porn? Julianne Moore's sudden, uncontrollable lust for the contents of Mark Ruffalo's pants? (I mean, come on--that "hello" at the first sight of his penis, as though she were welcoming her first meal after a long spell of starvation?) I was insulted, and I can't imagine many in the lesbian community weren't as well.
3. I found it cheap that the beginning of the resolution of the crisis involved Annette Benning's character dismissing Mark Ruffalo's as though he were the root of all evil. He is erased from the film, and seemingly from the characters' lives. An easier way of dealing with him but lazy.
4. Finally, much of the dialogue was painful, insipid, and psychobabbly. When I was thinking about the movie a while after watching it, I decided that it should have been a French movie made in the 1980s. Or maybe 1970s. Some along the lines of Murmur of the Heart. If it had been, and I watched it now, I would have had much more patience with it.
There's a few reasons, anyway.
