Critic Reviews

Sweet, generous and tonally sure, Patrik, Age 1.5 has a nostalgic feel, and not just because of a soundtrack skewed toward last-millennium tunes and a hyperreal suburban setting lifted straight from "Pleasantville."

This most observant and involving film has three strengths: It shows that a strongly family-oriented, middle-class suburbia is initially hardly idyllic for gays; the arrival of Patrik reveals fissures in Sven and Goran's relationship; and that Lemhagen, who plays against predictability at every turn, maintains suspense right up to the final minutes as to how everything may turn out for the three.

Yet Patrik, Age 1.5 does go further than "The Kids Are All Right" in its willingness to test the limits of mainstream tolerance for emerging family forms.

This homey construct is warm, exactingly crafted and painted with pop-country tones, but it's lacking a deep foundation where the issues that it raises can resonate. For a movie like that, we may have to depend on the Danes.

The cute little domestic comedy gains a slightly rough edge - maybe Sven isn't meant to be a father or a husband.

One is never bored, thanks to the innate charms of Skarsgård and young Ljungman.

Along the way Göran and Sven suffer the standard indignities of a Gay couple in an idyllic Swedish neighborhood. Which, as it turns out, are all the same indignities a Gay couple suffers living in an idyllic American neighborhood.

Patrik Age 1.5 has a single drawback that can't be overlooked, at least from the standpoint of an American viewer. It's predictable.

How Göran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama.