Blues in Hawaii for Clooney

Fans of George Clooney will love The Descendants, but it is not director Alexander Payne’s best work

SITTING in a screening of The Descendants this week, it was easy to see why the film's box office returns have been so healthy.
Row after row of adoring female Clooney-fans (accompanied by their less adoring spouses and boyfriends) had turned out for a glimpse of that still-chiseled jaw and “distinguished” grey mane. It's a testament to Clooney's pulling power that he's able to attract such a crowd, especially since The Descendants is a rather difficult and downbeat picture, far from the Rom-Com template that has proved so lucrative in the past.
Clooney's character, Matt King, is a rich but somewhat disenchanted lawyer from Hawaii. He is a direct descendant of Hawaii's last reigning monarch, and has inherited a vast tract of prime real-estate that constitutes the source of his wealth. The trust that holds the land is due to expire, and King faces a difficult decision over whether to sell the area for development. As he wrestles with this dilemma, his wife Alexandra is left comatose following a high-speed boating accident. As Matt attempts to come to terms with the tragedy, we learn that the marriage was facing difficulties, and that Alexandra was in fact having an affair prior to the accident. To complicate matters, Matt must also become sole parent to his two daughters, from whom he has grown distant.
Director Alexander Payne has established his reputation on such ‘masculinity in crisis' tales as this, and The Descendants is strongly reminiscent of his earlier film About Schmidt (the story of a lonely widower seeking fulfillment in his twilight years). Like that earlier work, The Descendants is a poignant and effecting tragi-comedy, but the director has toned down some of the harsher elements of his style. The protagonists in Payne's previous films have been 24-carat losers, living dismal, isolated lives, and wracked by regrets and disappointments. Much as I enjoyed The Descendants, George Clooney never quite convinces us that his life is as depressing as the film implies. Matt King is a solid alpha-male archetype, and our sympathies for him are never really challenged.
For fans of Alexander Payne's work, therefore, The Descendants may feel a little like Payne ‘lite'.
Then again, if a softening of the director's approach is the compromise needed to make a breakthrough hit, it is hard to object. The film is still a wonderful little portrait of a man struggling to cope, enhanced by some excellent cinematography and a good ear for appropriate music (the lyrical guitar pieces by Hawaiian musicians are particularly effective). Clooney's performance is charismatic and assured, there are good supporting turns from the rest of the cast (especially Robert Forster as Alexandra's cantankerous father), and the ending will elicit some genuine tears.
Furthermore, while Payne's previous films only made modest profits, The Descendants looks set to be a relative commercial success. One can only hope this will give the director greater freedom to experiment with the bitter-sweet stories that have become his hallmark. Highly recommended.
Rating: ****