Hollywood paints an updated portrait of the American family

For much of the 20th century, Norman Rockwell's Freedom From Want served as the portrait of the idealized American family. Here are three generations gathered around the dinner table as a smiling grandma presents her spawn and theirs with a roast turkey as big as a Buick.

If Rockwell were alive today, when there's a smorgasbord of options for building a clan, his picture of the American brood might resemble the post-nuclear family of The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's comedy opening Friday. Here are two lesbian mothers, their two teenagers - each the offspring of one of them - and the sperm-donor dad gathered around the picnic table, getting to know each other over burgers and chips 18 years after bio-dad's deposit at the sperm bank.

With Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as "the Moms," supremely straight in their gayness, and Mark Ruffalo as "Sperm Dad," nonconformist and noncommittal in his straightness, The Kids Are All Right is one of a clutch of recent films repainting the portrait of the American family. However imaginative some of the plots may be, academics and demographers agree that they represent America's evolving social arrangements.

In other words, what's bringing together the American family is no longer the turkey but the baster.

Among the others:

The Back-up Plan, a slapstick comedy with Jennifer Lopez as a single woman who has a successful insemination the very day she meets the perfect man, whom she dates during pregnancy.

Splice, a black-comic horror flick with Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as cohabiting genetic researchers who disagree about having kids (he wants, she doesn't) but who nonetheless become parents to a human/animal hybrid she creates using her own DNA.

The Switch (original title The Baster, and due Aug. 20), with Jennifer Aniston as the single woman who gets pregnant with donor sperm without realizing that her platonic friend (Jason Bateman) substituted his stuff for that of the anonymous donor.

"The family has changed so dramatically and so rapidly over the last 50 years that it's almost unrecognizable," says Elaine Tyler May, an American studies professor at the University of Minnesota and the author of America and the Pill. "These films are grappling with something that's come very rapidly into the American consciousness."

Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage: A History, adds, "What we're seeing on-screen reflects a perfect storm of new possibilities and new complications.