I wasn’t so sure how I was going to feel about The Descendants after the first few minutes. Alexander Payne is one of my favorite working filmmakers, so I was excited that he had finally made another feature, but the opening of the film didn’t sell me. It introduces us to the main character Matt (George Clooney). It lets us know that he has a wife who is in a boating accident related coma, two daughters who are more than just a bit of a handful, and that he is the head of a trust who owns a very large, very valuable piece of land. You see, this movie is set in Hawaii, and Matt’s ancestors go all the way back to the island’s original royalty. The first twenty minutes let us know all of this in a pretty concise info dump, but it lets us know by just dryly telling us.
Every bit of setup and exposition is done through voice over. Payne is a director who has adapted novels before, like he’s doing here, and he’s used voice over narration to move his films along previously; but I never found it quite as egregious as I did here. In his past works, and especially in Election, Payne was dealing with off-the-wall characters who had unique voices and interesting points of view. Comparatively, Clooney’s Matt is very milquetoast, and having him tell us this story isn’t much more interesting than sitting across a desk from a co-worker who you’re not particularly taken with and listening to them drone on about their personal life. After the first few minutes I was preparing myself to dislike an Alexander Payne film for the first time. But then there’s a plot twist that puts a very complicated new spin on everything Matt is dealing with, the narration completely stops, and from that point forward the film is all tense interactions and struggling with huge life hurdles. The Descendants is a movie that gets better and better as it goes on, and by the end I found myself really liking it.
That twist comes early enough and is featured prominently enough in the advertising that I don’t feel bad giving it away in this review. Matt finds out that his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), had been cheating on him. His friends know, his oldest daughter knows, but he had no idea. Suddenly Matt goes from being a sad but fairly uninteresting figure to being a swirling storm of emotion. His wife isn’t going to come out of her coma, she’s dying, and while he’s still emotionally devastated at the loss, he’s now also driven by an unexpected anger. It’s the same anger that his oldest daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) has been feeling for months, one that has gotten her in trouble at school and made her feel isolated from her family. Once the secret is out, the bond of shared pain begins to bring a very wounded girl and her very distant father together, and we’re off on our tale of bonding and adventure.
Alexandra convinces Matt that they should confront the man Elizabeth had been seeing on the side. He turns out to be a real estate agent named Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), a family man who has a connection to the big land deal that Matt is in charge of making. The situation is very complicated, and nobody knows how to feel or how to react to what’s going on, but essentially the entire movie becomes a big hunt for Matthew Lillard. That’s just the kind of ridiculous premise that’s perfect for Alexander Payne to mine his usual blend of dark comedy and both mock-heroic and legitimate interpersonal drama from.
The Descendants works so well because it’s so layered and complex. Every character has conflicting emotions and conflicting motivations that all keep changing on a dime depending on who they’re with and what their situation is at the moment. The relationships to people are never uniform. Matt has two daughters, over the course of the film he grows closer to his oldest, Alexandra, but he still doesn’t know how to relate to the ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller). Scottie is a bit weirder than Alexandra, and still too young to know how to process all of the things she’s going through in either healthy or destructive ways. Elizabeth’s father (Robert Forster) is a cold man who hates Matt, but he near worships his daughter, and seems to have more complex feelings about his granddaughters. Watching the dance of these characters’ actions and reactions is a lot of the fun of the movie. There is so much going on that it could have been a mess, Payne could have tried to juggle too many balls at once, but the performances he gets from his actors are all spot on enough that we know exactly how everyone is feeling at every moment. Once the confrontation scene with Lillard’s character happens, the controlled chaos is so awkward and delightful. Everyone is holding in their real feelings and trying to remain polite, but we can see the sheer panic on each of their faces as they try to navigate this hairy situation. It’s like real life cranked up ten notches.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that the performances are my favorite part. Clooney is very good in the lead role, and maybe even more so because Matt seems to be a character that is crafted to closely resemble Clooney’s specific screen persona. While he is always at least solid in things, his efforts here are pronounced because Matt is a character who benefits from his magnetic yet cooly detached screen presence. The fact that Clooney rarely ever cries makes it especially powerful here when he eventually does. The kids are key. If they didn’t find the right girls to play the daughters, then this movie could have been a disaster; but Woodley and Miller pull it off. Woodley especially makes this her movie. In many ways she is the character who gets the biggest arc, going from a little kid acting out to blossoming into the matronly presence in her family, and it’s largely her personality that drives forward the story. If she wasn’t there pushing her dad to act, this whole movie might have been two hours of Clooney raging next to a hospital bed. For being a such a young actress, Woodley rises to the occasion and then some. Also along for the ride is Alexandra’s dimwitted friend Sid (Nick Krause), and I would be remiss in not mentioning him. Much of the humor stems from his inexplicable presence during these very intense family moments, and I can’t tell if this kid is honestly hilarious or just a dimwit. Chris Klein played a similar role in Payne’s Election, and I think time has proven that he was more a legitimate dimwit than he was a talented comedic actor, so I guess time will be the test for Krause as well; but he’s hilarious in this regardless.
Aside from the intriguingly wounded characters and the strong acting that brings them to life, there are a couple other praiseworthy things that The Descendants has going for it as well. Payne always has an eye for naturalist photography, and his taking Hawaii on as his subject works out just as well as his past capturings of urban Nebraska and the Napa Valley. He uses a lot of natural light and can make landscapes glow with beauty, but he also has an eye for the mundane and depressing, and he shows us a dirty, urban side of Hawaii that rarely gets focus. It’s cliché to call a film’s setting one of the characters, but here it’s definitely at least one of the film’s themes.
A big deal is made about Matt being a descendant of the original inhabitants of the island. It’s made clear that most of Hawaii is hanging on his decision about what he’s going to do with his family’s land. The people are connected to the island, and he feels like he has a responsibility to it, but what is the appropriate decision to make? Should he allow condos and hotels to develop, giving the public a way to enjoy his family’s secret paradise? Or should he keep it hidden away and preserve the untouched beauty of the landscape? The question is a tough one. Almost as tough as the question of how to feel about a dying wife who has betrayed you. I don’t quite know what all of the connections are that can be made between the family’s struggle with their obligations to their wife and mother and their struggle with their obligations to their ancestors and homeland, but I’ve been thinking about them ever since I got out of the theater. It has a bit of a rough start, but The Descendants is a movie that sticks with you in the end.
