The Descendants

To contact us Click HERE
Woodley, Clooney, Miller, and Krause, on the beach in The Descendants
Writer-director Alexander Payne’s films—if About Schmidt, Sideways, and now TheDescendants are any indication—are sensitive, expressive investigationsinto white, middle-class, heterosexual masculinity.  George Clooney, recently nominated for anAcademy Award for his role, for which he already won a Golden Globe, plays MattKing, a real estate lawyer in Hawai’i whose life falls apart when his wife’sinjury in a boating accident leaves her in an irreversible coma.  In the voiceover that frames much of thefilm, Matt admits that he’s always been the back-up parent to his twodaughters, and can’t quite fathom what to do with his family when he’s left incharge.
As his wife lies in a hospital bed kept alive by aventilator and IV fluids, Matt is called to his 10-year-old daughter Scottie’selementary school to apologize for the photographs the girl took of herindisposed mother, which she pasted into an album to share at show and tell.  Then he has to bring Scottie (Amara Miller)to a classmate’s house to apologize for more of her indiscretions.  The kid is foul-mouthed and unpredictable; asMatt talks on the phone, he sees her throwing deck chairs into the familypool.  So he wrangles Scotty onto a planeand goes off to the Big Island to collect her 17-year-old sister, Alexandra (ShaileneWoodley), hoping she can help out.
Instead, Matt finds Alex drinking with a friend,out past her curfew on the grounds of the private school at which sheboards.  When he and Scottie bring Alex home,she’s hostile and impertinent.  At herlast visit home, she fought with her mom, and doesn’t hesitate to inform Mattthat his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) was having an affair.  Matt knows he’s been an inattentive husbandand an absent father, but this news unravels what he thought was his safe,secure world.


Woodley as Alex informing Matt about her mom's affair
Clooney is a subtle actor, with an admirablewillingness to push beyond his handsome, action-star reputation.  (He’s also very good as a corruptpresidential candidate in The Ides ofMarch.)  Matt’s face and bearingchange in small but significant ways when Alex tells him about Elizabeth’sinfidelity.  He changes from a smoothpublic operator to a man humiliated by what he didn’t know about the most intimateaspects of his own life.
This new knowledge unmans him, but it also (ofcourse) humanizes him, and sends him careening toward his own redemption.  In his more feminized role as a cuckold, Mattalso gets a handle on his parenting.  Heand Alex form a bond over their determination to track down and confront BrianSpeer (Matthew Lillard), the realtor who was Elizabeth’s other man.
Once the story focuses on finding Brian Speer, The Descendants becomes a kind ofintra-Hawai’i road movie, except that Matt and his family fly among the islandsto track Brian down.  [Spoiler alert, though nothing in the film is really a surprise.]  They’re accompanied by Sid (Nick Krause), Alex’sthe hapless guy friend, whose presence she insists will help her be more civilto her father and her family.  While atfirst Sid seems a thoughtless, insensitive child—he laughs at her grandmother’sAlzheimer’s and doesn’t seem very sympathetic to Matt’s plight—it turns outthat he recently lost his father and proves more emotionally acute than Payneat first lets on.  The foursome slowly,carefully reconstitutes a semblance of family by replacing their grief over Elizabeth’simpending death with their wrath about Brian Speer.


Julie and Brian Speer (Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard)
When they find him on Kaua’i, and it turns out Speerhas a wife and two small kids.  Theirrage dissipates into irritated sorrow, as Matt understands that the man he’s picturedas a mythic monster is really just an ordinary person who made a mistake.  In their climactic confrontation, Mattinsists things happen for a reason, but Speer argues that, to the contrary, sometimesthings just happen.  Living within thatcapriciousness is part of Matt’s life lesson, and forgiveness becomes the film’srather pat, too comfortable denouement.
Elizabeth dies after they remove the ventilator—inaccord with her living will.  Matt andhis daughters sprinkle her ashes off a canoe they row out to sea, encirclingthe dissolving ash with their leis as the huge hotels of the Oahu shore loom inthe background.  In the film’s last shot,Matt, Alex, and Scottie lounge silently but companionably on the family couch,watching March of the Penguinstogether as they eat ice cream.  With thestationary camera set in a medium shot, we watch them make room for oneanother, sharing a blanket and their dessert as they listen to Sydney Poitiernarrate the epic story of penguin families and their journey.  The analogy couldn’t be clearer.


The final shot, family united, no mother
Payne contrives the plot to serve Matt’s characterdevelopment.  As in Sideways, all that really happens in The Descendants is that a man weathers a mid-life crisis and comesout on the other side, knowing himself a little better and becoming moreforgiving of himself and his circumstances. Matt, mind you, has a very good life—his last name, after all, is“King,” and his family owns a large parcel of land on Oahu, the sale of whichthe whole state is apparently tracking.
When it turns out that the Brian Speer (whose nameis also perhaps too symbolic) stands to profit from the sale, Matt waxessentimental about being Hawaiian (his great-grandmother was an island native).  Against the wishes of his (mostly male)cousins, Matt decides to keep the land (and a beautiful stretch of gorgeousblue-green ocean and pristine sand and dunes it is, too—the film makes Hawai’i looklike paradise).
Matt and his daughters observing the King family land
Clooney’s performance is open and moving.  He abandons his movie star glamor to play aman who wears short-sleeved Hawai’in shirts and pastel pants with high-ridingwaists.  His hair is streaked with grayand his face is lined and worn.  He’s deceivedby a man who’s clearly not his kind or dignified equal.  But Speer’s very inadequacies secure Matt’sessential goodness.  His emotions movefrom rage to forgiveness.  He kisses his unconsciouswife’s cracked lips when he tearfully says good-bye, using the occasion of herloss to accept his own failings and become a better man.
Matt and Alex find their new and better selves overElizabeth’s inert body, talking to her as she lies immobile and unhearing.  Alex, too, rises to the occasion of hermother’s death, guiding her little sister and supporting her dad.  Woodley is terrific as Alex, playing a girlthrust into adulthood perhaps a bit too quickly without a trace ofsentimentality.  She’s smart, thoughtful,and always seems in control, registering Alex’s emotion without wallowing.  She matches Clooney scene for scene.


Clooney and Woodley
But as in Payne’s Sideways, women are the agents of the men’s transformation in The Descendants.  Clooney makes Matt King appealing enough thatthe film is a pleasure to watch, but I preferred him in Up in the Air, which reversed gender stereotypes by makingClooney’s character the naïve romantic with unfounded expectations of the womanwith whom he’s having an affair.
Too many contemporary films rely on the old (oftendead) woman-as-agent-of-man’s-self-knowledge-and-redemption trope.  Just in the recent crop of 2011 fall andChristmas movies, for only two among many examples, Ryan Gosling’s character inThe Ides of March has his epiphanywhen the beautiful, young, naïve Evan Rachel Wood character commits suicideover her affair with Clooney’s presidential candidate-senator.
And in the critically touted Iranian film The Separation (nominated for a BestForeign Film Academy Award), the wife who insists on divorcing her husband isblamed for the subsequent family tragedies and indirectly for the miscarriageof the woman whom he hires to replace his wife’s domestic labor.  The considerably less privileged woman isalso portrayed as immoral, while her husband—despite his tendency towardviolence—is redeemed by his grief over his unborn child’s loss.  The pattern persists.
TheDescendants is well-written, beautifully photographed, and wonderfullyacted, but the story it tells is tired and familiar.  And the woman, once again, has to take itlying down.
The Feminist Spectator