Exclusive Clip: Behind The Scenes Of The Kids Are All Right

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski has often told a story about the late Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Stephen Franklin on that seminal SF series. After Biggs passed away at a tragically young age in 2004, his widow told Straczynski that Biggs had always been thankful for the role of Franklin because it never called attention to his race. Unlike many roles for African-Americans, there was never any "very special episode" of B5 that dealt with the matter. Rather than a black character, Franklin was written as a character who happened to be black. It was simply part of who he was, one aspect amongst many, and ultimately pretty insignificant in a universe where your next-door neighbor might breathe ammonia.

I mention this because The Kids Are All Right, which hits Blu-ray and DVD today, could very easily have become the filmic equivalent of one of those "very special episodes." The story of a lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) raising two teenaged kids whose lives are turned upside down when the kiddos track down their sperm-donor father (Mark Ruffalo), Kids is the sort of movie that could all too easily have become preachy or spent so much time focusing on the big issues that it forgot to tell a story. Thankfully, as Eric Eisenberg explains in his review, the movie succeeds because, even though it's a movie about two gay women, "the movie isn’t actually about these women being gay."

The Kids Are Alright is a story about family, and even if the family looks different from yours, most of the problems they face share fundamental truths with all the rest of us. That's a damned important lesson in a time when our culture can't come to an agreement over whether a segment of our populace should be allowed to marry. The Kids Are All Right is available today on Blu-ray and DVD from Focus Features. You can check out an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip below, featuring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, and writer/director Lisa Cholodenko.