The Kids Grow Up Review and Showtimes
GoingOutGuide
Subscribe:
Editors' pick
The Kids Grow Up
MPAA rating:
Documentary
This wonderful film chronicles filmmaker Doug Block's daughter as she prepares to leave home and go off to college. But the film is less about her and more a tender portrait of the aging, mortality and marriage of her parents.
Doug Block
Running time:
Editorial Review
A void that fills the empty nextBy Ann HornadayFriday, March 11, 2011
Last year was an especially fecund one for films dealing with soon-to-be-empty nests. Between "The Kids Are All Right" and "Toy Story 3," audiences were gifted with particularly sensitive portrayals of one of the most bittersweet passages in family life, when the first child prepares to leave for college.
Still, as wonderful as those fiction films were, they don't hold a wry or wistful candle to "The Kids Grow Up," Doug Block's intimate, funny, deeply affecting diary of his daughter Lucy's final year at home. In 2005, Block made "51 Birch Street," a delicately layered portrait of his parents' relationship while he was growing up in suburban New York in the 1950s. Like that film, "The Kids Grow Up" is both a close examination of family tectonics and a more universal depiction of a cultural moment. In this case, that larger zeitgeist has to do with a generation that came of age being obsessively videotaped by baby boomer parents who were often more interested in being buddies than authority figures. And, when Block's stepson has a baby in the course of the film, "The Kids Grow Up" obliquely chronicles a cohort of men who, decades after the feminist revolution, are finally asking how to balance work and family.
"The Kids Grow Up" begins on a sweetly elegiac note, as Block's young daughter Lucy practices ballet steps in front of his camera. In deciding to make his daughter his subject, Block isn't a mere doting dad: She's a genuinely captivating character, who in a series of exquisitely edited sequences evolves from an enchanting, dimpled child into a self-possessed young woman of serenely regal bearing. One moment she's a babbling toddler in the back of Block's car and in an instant she's driving it, a wordless, graceful expression of the time-warp occupied by parents who can't help but see the baby in the adults their children become.
As Lucy begins to prepare for college, along the way acquiring a serious boyfriend, Block begins to film her more obsessively, all the while observed by his preternaturally understanding wife, Marjorie. A wise, unflappable law professor, Marjorie greets her husband's increasing anxiety over Lucy's impending departure with frank equanimity, at one point asking whether his distress has less to do with missing Lucy than "what the rest of your life is going to look like."
Of course, she's right: As "The Kids Grow Up" takes its twists and turns throughout the year, it becomes more clearly evident that the film isn't about Lucy at all but about confronting the larger looming issues of aging, mortality and the meaning of marital intimacy. As Block's father says at one point, the hardest part of the empty nest is being "faced with your own life." Personal without falling into solipsism, revealing without succumbing to exploitation, achingly sad, but suffused with tenderness, optimism and warmth, "The Kids Grow Up" exemplifies personal filmmaking at its most truthful and absorbing. It's more than all right. It's wonderful.
Contains nothing objectionable.
Recently Reviewed
Copyright &
2014 The Washington Post
Share your Want to go and Been there lists with Facebook friends. See where your friends want to go or where they've been and make plans together!
Connect with facebook
Alert: The following underlined text is not permitted:
Title your review
Choose a star rating:
Alert: The following underlined text is not permitted:
Leave a review
0 of 750 Characters. HTML and URLs are prohibited
Post to Facebook
Thank you for submitting the review.
You have chosen to submit a user review for possible removal by our editorial staff due to its offensive or inappropriate nature. Please confirm that you would like the review submitted for evaluation. If our editors find that the review does not fall within our , then it will be removed promptly.
The user review that you selected has been submitted for evaluation by our editors. It usually takes us about 5-7 days to evaluate a review.Thanks for the notification!
Send This Profile to:
Your E-mail Address:
Add a Personal Message:
Your email has been sent.
Please choose at least one newsletter.
Eats & Drinks
Going Out Guide events
With the Kids
Google plus
Add to Go Out List
Please enter a keyword in the search box}