Mark Ruffallo

Went to see "The Kids are Alright" and liked it but not as much as reviewers did. There has not been a bad review for it. Yet most of them called it a comedy and, in some cases, a hilarious one; I chuckled a few times but thought it bordered at times on tragedy. One reviewer who thought it wonderful in most respects wondered, at the end of his review, what the point of it was.
I wonder if he has ever asked this question at the end of most Hollywood blockbusters. You don't, do you? You just sit there and let it affect you in some ways - enjoy the explosions, admire the guile (or pigheadedness) of Bruce Willis, hate it etc. - but you don't ask the point of it. No, what the critic meant I think was: here's a serious film about marriage, gays bringing up children, a gay woman being attracted to a man, children's lives being affected and so on - but so what?
I can see his point. It didn't try to give advice or produce a solution to any of the problems, it just accepted that they were there.
Actually there is a point to the film I believe: it is a film directed by a lesbian in a long term relationship with another woman and she, like many homosexuals, wants such people to be treated with the same respect as other "normal" affairs. She wants society to go some way further in acceptance of homosexuality by treating gay and lesbian affairs as perfectly normal. That's the point of it I believe.
Why pick two heterosexual woman then to play the two lesbians? Good as they were, all the time I kept thinking "they are pretending to be lesbians". When the oscars come round both actresses will, no doubt, be nominated (Annette Benning will win) and like most winners they will be picked because they are playing a person with some deficiency - blind maybe, or one-footed or a savage beast like Brando in Streetcar etc. So, instead of making the "deficiency" here, viz. homosexuality, more acceptable the outcome will be the reverse.
The great performance in the film comes from Mark Ruffallo as the donor father of the two kids. Like he did in "You can Count on Me" he makes the rogue of a guy genial. In that excellent film he played a character that you could count on as much as you could count on Osama bin Laden to join the NSPCC. Here was another remarkable perfornmance. It's this should get an oscar (it won't even be nominated) not the two women stars.
But now, it turns out, Ruffallo has been offered the part of The Hunk in a new film. What's more he's looking forward to it very much.
End of wonderful career?