ALMOST everyone will enjoy the George Clooney/Alexander Payne film The Descendants. In the lead is our most unambiguously appealing movie star, looking, as Mary Astor described Clark Gable, “crumbly” in a handsome array of Hawaiian shirts, glowing with a tropical tan as if he’d been regularly rubbed with tung oil.
Behind and around the eminently watchable Clooney is more Hawaii than I’ve seen in a feature film in decades. The soundtrack is rhapsodic and full of well-chosen island music. Each location seems more plumeria-scented and succulent than the one before, but The Descendants doesn’t give us a staged Hawaii, like the lobby of a Sheraton. This Hawaii is affluent, though, and you don’t get the highs and lows of life there.
Director Payne balances Honolulu’s wealthier suburbs with the as-yet-unbulldozed corners of Kauai. Unlike many of the bad movies made in Hawaii recently (Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Just Go With It come to mind), the land and the seascapes are photographed with considerable care by Phedon Papamicheal.
And if this comedy/drama is fairly vanilla, from the completely trustworthy narration to the cartoon maps showing the journeys to the final assurance to the audience that all is well—if it’s a movie that hugs the family tree trunk when von Trier and Terrence Malick are going out on a limb—it is still a rare mainstream movie that fits with what you might know about the islands.
One can easily suppose that the “King family” is a substitute for the royal name of one of the biggest-name property holders in Hawaii, known for lots of idle country-club cousins.
Clooney’s Matt King differs from his relatives. Matt is a lawyer who toils while his family has a good time. The film’s press material amusingly describes King as a “flawed character,” by which they mean he’s an overworker who neglects his family. Don’t go to The Descendants if you expect the kind of character flaws found in Cheever or Updike.
Matt’s wife languishes in a coma after a bad boating accident. He goes to retrieve his daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), currently immured at a strict boarding school because of her partying. Alexandra confesses that she’s been acting out lately because she saw her mom with a stranger’s hands on her.
Matt also has to deal with his cutely awkward, profane younger daughter, Scottie (Pacific Grove’s Amara Miller, debuting), as well as with his ornery father-in-law (Robert Forster, excellently embodying the old military side of Hawaii). Coming along for the ride is Alexandra’s pal Sid (Nick Krause), her seemingly silly young partner in partying, who wedges himself into this family tragedy.
Meanwhile, Matt must make the painful decision to liquidate a piece of property that he’s holding in trust for the rest of the family. The end result of the deal will be yet another resort with golf course, part of the endless effort to turn Hawaii into Costa Mesa.
All of this family angst leaves Matt with little free time, but he decides to track down his wife’s lover to let him know she’s in serious condition at the hospital. This situation of a husband stalking his wife’s lover, to do both wife and lover a favor, has a Lubitsch tang to it. Clooney is roguish and entertaining; he gives the kind of star’s performance that probably only looks easy and smooth to pull off. And he finishes with some very heavy old-school acting, which puts Clooney farther out on the aforementioned limb than he is in the rest of the film. He usually doesn’t do lamentations.
Payne made Sideways seven years ago. If The Descendants is a successful comeback, a shoe-in for Oscars and so forth, it’s also very commercial. The breathtaking tartness of that wine-tasting film isn’t visible here. Despite the complaints of the Hawaiian-born Matt that there is no paradise on this Earth, the arguments advanced for local pride, strong fathers and good breeding suggest otherwise. That’s not a bad thing, and you can enjoy the classicism of it all, but it’s not taking movies to the next level.
The Descendants
R; 115 min.
Opens Nov. 23
