Ratings:
The Daily: 4 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
More on the 'Descendants'
IMDB
Official Website
George Clooney is often lauded for his poise, his charisma, his looks. But until recently we have not had the opportunity to consider his running style. This makes sense. Clooney plays charmers, for the most part: politicians, laconic criminals, roguish father figures. But now, Alexander Payne, director of “The Descendants,” has discovered the actor’s run — loafer-clad, elbows out, knees forward, mouth open, gasping for breath. If there were an Olympics just for old white dads, Clooney would be a runaway gold medalist.
Here he plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer, and he is simultaneously running toward and away from the second of two difficult revelations visited upon him in rapid succession. First, he learns that his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), is in a coma, the result of a boating accident. She is probably not going to wake up. Second, as Matt’s daughter (Shailene Woodley) angrily tells him, Elizabeth has been unfaithful. Matt’s subsequent awkward sprint through his lush and overcast neighborhood, tears threatening around his eyes, sweat blooming on his back, is Payne’s film in a single image — funny and sad at the same time, purposeful and slapstick.
“The Descendants” is a triumph not just of storytelling but of tone. The script, adapted from a Kaui Hart Hemmings novel by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, leavens a gloomy story with jokes and one-liners: “In Hawaii, some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen,” Matt observes in voice-over, describing his many cousins. They are royalty, descendants of Hawaii’s first white settlers on one side and island natives on the other, and among Matt’s many other problems — coming to terms with his wife’s impending death and infidelity; figuring out how to raise their two unhappy girls, 10 and 17 — is his status as the family’s sole trustee. The King family is in possession of thousands of acres of pristine Hawaiian land worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they are preparing to break up their ancestral trust and sell it off.
This is a conspicuous, unsubtle metaphor, and not the film’s only one, either. (“My family feels exactly like an archipelago,” Matt observes while flying from one Hawaiian island to another.) But one of the many pleasures of “The Descendants” is how free it is from any sort of moral posturing. Matt’s the “back-up parent,” lost in a light scrum of work and easy living; he doesn’t really know his daughters, didn’t really know his wife. In the wake of tragedy, the family misbehaves together — the younger daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), throws chairs into their dirty pool; the elder one, Alex (Woodley), drinks, rages at her comatose mother and lugs her doofus friend Sid (Nick Krause) around to family gatherings as emotional ballast.
Matt, for his part, deputizes Alex in his search for her mother’s lover (Matthew Lillard); the scene in which they finally track him down and confront him is one of the most satisfying and well-acted set pieces to appear in a movie this year. “This is him?” Woodley sneers, and Clooney gamely lays back, apparently in awe — as we are — of the younger actress’ performance. It’s a generous ensemble turn that doesn’t mask how hard or effectively Clooney himself is working. With his aloha shirts, shuffling gait and swooping graying hair, he neither judges nor bothers to redeem the script’s bewildered patriarch.
“The Descendants” is the rare movie about family that doesn’t make a fetish out of its subject. Instead, Payne makes a gentle argument for dealing with those we love or used to love as they are, rather than as we’d like them to be. Affection and connection are nice. But just paying attention trumps all.
The Daily: 4 of 5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes: 93%
More on the 'Descendants'
IMDB
Official Website
George Clooney is often lauded for his poise, his charisma, his looks. But until recently we have not had the opportunity to consider his running style. This makes sense. Clooney plays charmers, for the most part: politicians, laconic criminals, roguish father figures. But now, Alexander Payne, director of “The Descendants,” has discovered the actor’s run — loafer-clad, elbows out, knees forward, mouth open, gasping for breath. If there were an Olympics just for old white dads, Clooney would be a runaway gold medalist.
Here he plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer, and he is simultaneously running toward and away from the second of two difficult revelations visited upon him in rapid succession. First, he learns that his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), is in a coma, the result of a boating accident. She is probably not going to wake up. Second, as Matt’s daughter (Shailene Woodley) angrily tells him, Elizabeth has been unfaithful. Matt’s subsequent awkward sprint through his lush and overcast neighborhood, tears threatening around his eyes, sweat blooming on his back, is Payne’s film in a single image — funny and sad at the same time, purposeful and slapstick.
“The Descendants” is a triumph not just of storytelling but of tone. The script, adapted from a Kaui Hart Hemmings novel by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, leavens a gloomy story with jokes and one-liners: “In Hawaii, some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen,” Matt observes in voice-over, describing his many cousins. They are royalty, descendants of Hawaii’s first white settlers on one side and island natives on the other, and among Matt’s many other problems — coming to terms with his wife’s impending death and infidelity; figuring out how to raise their two unhappy girls, 10 and 17 — is his status as the family’s sole trustee. The King family is in possession of thousands of acres of pristine Hawaiian land worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and they are preparing to break up their ancestral trust and sell it off.
This is a conspicuous, unsubtle metaphor, and not the film’s only one, either. (“My family feels exactly like an archipelago,” Matt observes while flying from one Hawaiian island to another.) But one of the many pleasures of “The Descendants” is how free it is from any sort of moral posturing. Matt’s the “back-up parent,” lost in a light scrum of work and easy living; he doesn’t really know his daughters, didn’t really know his wife. In the wake of tragedy, the family misbehaves together — the younger daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), throws chairs into their dirty pool; the elder one, Alex (Woodley), drinks, rages at her comatose mother and lugs her doofus friend Sid (Nick Krause) around to family gatherings as emotional ballast.
Matt, for his part, deputizes Alex in his search for her mother’s lover (Matthew Lillard); the scene in which they finally track him down and confront him is one of the most satisfying and well-acted set pieces to appear in a movie this year. “This is him?” Woodley sneers, and Clooney gamely lays back, apparently in awe — as we are — of the younger actress’ performance. It’s a generous ensemble turn that doesn’t mask how hard or effectively Clooney himself is working. With his aloha shirts, shuffling gait and swooping graying hair, he neither judges nor bothers to redeem the script’s bewildered patriarch.
“The Descendants” is the rare movie about family that doesn’t make a fetish out of its subject. Instead, Payne makes a gentle argument for dealing with those we love or used to love as they are, rather than as we’d like them to be. Affection and connection are nice. But just paying attention trumps all.
