There’s no shortage of baggage that comes with being part of a family, being a descendant, part of something older and larger than yourself. For all the support it can provide, there can also be weighty expectations and uncomfortable responsibilities. In Alexander Payne’s new film, The Descendants, Matt King (George Clooney) is a man collapsing under that weight even as he leans heavily on those closest to him. This is Payne, director of biting comedies like Election and Sideways, in a more contemplative and sentimental mood than we’ve ever seen him in. But if The Descendants lacks the edge of some of his previous work, it more than makes up for it in the natural honesty the film employs to examine the messy ways that families lie, cheat, and try to destroy themselves from the inside; and why, despite that, we desperately seek the comfort they provide.
Don’t let that make you think Payne has left behind the comedy that balances the darker directions of his work. There’s some concern of this at this film’s start, as a deadly serious tragedy strikes Matt’s family when his wife Elizabeth suffers a head injury that renders her comatose, with little hope of revival. The script, by Payne with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (Community‘s Dean Pelton), based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, holds back jokes of any kind for much of the opening act, which is dominated by too much expository narration from King. The grim tone and the endless talking threaten to sink Descendants early, though in the end it seems a necessary evil to quickly fill in a lot of back story that the novel likely had more time to delve into than the film.
Matt is descended from Hawaiian royalty, three generations removed from an intermarriage between a native queen and a white settler in the 19th century that left his family in control of vast acres of land on Kauai that has slowly been sold off over the years and now, due to laws restricting their ownership, must be divested completely. The deal promises to bring millions to Matt and his many cousins, but the decision is his alone as the sole trustee. Payne establishes the controversial nature of the deal — which would bring development to pristine, untouched land — which Matt must navigate even as he deals with his dying wife and the two daughters he’s been somewhat delinquent in parenting up until now.
Matt hasn’t just been absent as a father, but also as a husband, and those are wrongs he resolves to remedy as soon as his Elizabeth recovers. That is, until he gets a crushing one-two punch, finding out from the doctors that they will need to pull the plug, and then from his oldest daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) that his wife was having an affair. It’s this second revelation, oddly, that finally allows Payne to release the pain-tinged laughs, in a scene that finds Clooney awkwardly and comically running around his neighborhood to verify his daughter’s revelation with a pair of close friends.
It also sets the family off on a trip to find Elizabeth’s lover, Brian, a real estate agent played by Matthew Lillard. Matt’s motives are mixed: he claims he feels it’s right to let Brian know about the accident, but given the fact that Elizabeth is unavailable for confrontation — though Matt tries in a particularly painful scene in which he berates her as she lies unconscious — Brian is the only guilty party he can vent to with any satisfaction.
This spins The Descendants into an oddball road movie that is not unlike Sideways or About Schmidt, as Matt travels to the island where Brian is vacationing with his daughters, and Alex’s boyfriend Sid, in tow. While there’s nothing astonishing or particularly revelatory about the emotional places these characters end up, Payne’s refusal to let them descend easily into stereotypes makes for sensitive and affecting viewing.
Just when it seems that surfer dude Sid is going to be a throwaway joke — one hilarious scene puts him into a confrontation with Elizabeth’s father, irascibly portrayed by Robert Forster — Payne gives him a central, moving scene with Matt that gives him depth and character. Just when it seems Brian is going to be made into the callous homewrecker, his confrontation with Matt complicates things. Just as it would be easy to place blame for any of the familial clashes that arise throughout the movie on any one person, Payne throws blame all around. We’re all a mess, get used to it.
Playing characters that are less archetypes and more complicated humans demands a lot of the actors, each of whom delivers. Clooney and Woodley play off one another beautifully in the lead pair. Brought together initially by the fact that Alexandra’s anger towards her mother outweighs her resentment towards her father, as time goes on the two develop a partnership that feels like the considered détente necessary between a willful teenage girl and her father when true need strikes.
Payne has a particular skill for making movie stars seem like normal people, and the resolute normalcy of the cast helps accomplish one of the film’s goals, to show Hawaii not as a resort paradise, but as a place like any other where people live, work, love, and die. Family here, as anywhere, is bound to disappoint you. They also might surprise you. More often, as Payne depicts in the film’s quietly hopeful coda, they’re just the people it’s most comfortable and safe to be around. That’s a modest statement more than a great one, but appropriate for a modest film that manages to be great.
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The Descendants
Directed by Alexander Payne
Written by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings
Starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause
Running time: 115 minutes
Rated R for language including some sexual references.
Opens today at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Georgetown.
