Meredith Scott Lynn | Parental Guidance / 2008

the straight kids scold their queer elders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Meredith Scott Lynn (screenwriter and director) Parental Guidance / 2008 [4.40 minutes]

 

Ava (Rachel Nicole Hamilton) and Max (Ryan Ochoa), children, are sitting outside a cabin within which Ava’s two mothers and Max’s two fathers are all busy loudly arguing with each other. Why is never established.

     But Ava and Max are totally fed up and flee to the nearby lake. Max is the first to speak: “Ava, I know you’re hurting. And I can relate to your pain. But we can’t take untimely and dysfunctional communication personally.”

     So begins a conversation between the children that is a level far over their parents’ head, as they commit themselves, if it should ever come to be, to a relationship: “If our winding hearts lead us to one another’s paths in maturation, I will always try to stay mindful of your needs and encourage you to make them known to me.”

     Ava responds with something similar, but these are, after all, amateur child actors and their diction does not always fully translate to my older ears as they breathlessly rush through these long-winded lines.

     But we get the point. They are fully mature, while the parents are like children throwing tantrums.

    If director Meredith Scott Lynn had perhaps extended her one-line satire and created children that behaved closer to the characters in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in which the children always speak in more grammatically perfect sentences and in a much more intelligent way than the adults, Parental Guidance might have succeeded.

     But frankly, in this silly little piece, we cannot believe either the children nor the adults. Why should two lesbians and two gay men all be shouting at the top of their voices, and why should the

children commit to eternal understanding of one another. If their parents are really that hot-headed it is doubtful that these children would have come to these values or the language they are trying to hurry through. As it is, I might suggest these two obnoxiously correct little beings should enter the cabin and quiet down their maters and paters by simply reminding them there are kids in the house.

     But this little fantasy isn’t interested in a solution, just the obvious juxtaposition of responsible behavior. Sorry, I don’t believe it for a moment. And I was happy that everyone soon after was hurried off stage and back into their real lives.

     Finally, what was the point of this satiric exercise? To point out that even gay men and women lose their cool now and then? That two gay men and two lesbians in the same room generally results in chaos? That future straight children know best? That normalcy is better that being queer? Since its subject is not really about the gay couples it mentions only in passing, the film seems to be moving in the direction of queer baiting, 

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).