Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Judy Greer and Beau Bridges
Directed By: Alexander Payne
Screenplay By: Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Based on the Novel By: Kaui Hart Hemmings
Produced By: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor
Distributor: Fox Searchlight
Rating: R
Running Time: Approximately 115 minutes
Website: foxsearchlight.com/thedescendants
Budget: $29 million
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Release Date: November 18, 2011
The Descendants lays its cards on the table early. As Matt King (George Clooney) narrates over shots of congested highways and dirty urban landscapes that look like smog-smeared Los Angeles, we come to realize quickly that this is Hawaii, and that what Matt tells us is true: just because people live in paradise doesn’t mean they don’t have the same problems as everyone else. The setting may look lovely to the outsider, but, as with most things in life, the presence of people makes it complicated and often uncomfortable.
Matt may have problems, but they aren’t typical. His wife, Elizabeth, is in a coma after a boating accident, an event that coincides with Matt, a lawyer, dealing with how to dispense with a large tract of prime Hawaiian real estate that’s been in his family for generations. Under pressure by greedy family members to close the deal (they all stand to net millions), Matt must navigate business pressures while trying to keep his family together. Used to being a self-described “back-up parent,” he has a hard time corralling his two unruly daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and rebellious Alex (Shailene Woodley of TV’s “The Secret Life of the American Teenager”), retrieved kicking and screaming from her boarding school. Faced with the bad news of his wife’s hastening end, Alex drops a bombshell on him that affects his whole view of their marriage: Elizabeth had been cheating on him, and was planning to ask him for a divorce to be with a local real estate agent (Matthew Lillard, Scream). Matt becomes preoccupied with tracking down and confronting the man in the midst of preparations for Elizabeth’s approaching end and his imminent business deal, a process which has him reevaluating his life and the family he doesn’t really know at all.
The presence of Clooney and a pair of adorably obnoxious kids might point toward The Descendants being a different kind of movie than it actually is, full of life lessons and irreverent family bonding. The gravity of its subject matter, however, always grounds even its more outrageous aspects. This is a drama first and foremost, and there isn’t a witty rejoinder or laid-back Hawaiian smile that isn’t tinged with the impending sadness. The movie certainly does have comedy, from the foul mouths of Alex and Scottie to Alex’s sort-of boyfriend, a surfer-type who doesn’t get punched in the face nearly as often as he should. Clooney, with his salt-and-pepper hair and nascent jowls, is aging away from the heroic roles of his youth (wasted on movies like The Peacekeeper and the worst Batman movie ever) and into more mature, much more demanding leading roles that require him to rein in the charm and depend on an actual connection to his character. As Matt, Clooney gets it.
The films of director Alexander Payne tend to trade in the nuances of everyday desperation; in fact, About Schmidt and Election could appear in a dictionary next to “everyday desperation.” The Descendants, along with Sideways, represents a more bourgeois kind of despair, but one full of all the uncertainty and angst common to everyone regardless of their income tax bracket. As such, Payne, who co-wrote the script, never offers an easy solution, and like his earlier movies, there isn’t much of a dramatic arc despite the high stakes: things happen, some of them are good and some of them are bad, and whoever’s left standing has to pick up the pieces and carry on. Payne, however, is good at drawing out the emotions to the point that you don’t really mind the sloppy resolutions. In Payne’s hands, Miller and, in particular, Woodley, take two “stubborn-but-spunky” kids’ roles that would be hackneyed and cliché in other hands and make them seem perfectly at home in these literal life-and-death circumstances, between them and Clooney managing to comment on the universal ingratitude of children and the universal bafflement of parents.
Both set and shot in Hawaii, the state does get shown off, despite the bleak opening, with crowds of people in ridiculous cabana wear strolling through ridiculous-in-a-different-way scenes of lush tropical greenery. In the middle of all this are Matt, his family, and his misery, waiting in paradise for the snake that’s going to ruin everything. The Descendants, with its plotlines of infidelity, parental neglect, and “Do Not Resuscitate” forms, isn’t a feel-good movie, but it mixes the bitter with the sweet to such a degree that you believe this family can carry on when it all goes to hell, and maybe even be better for it.
3 Stars (out of 5)
