I had my doubts from the beginning. George Clooney, a script full of daddy issues and the perpetually pregnant girl from The Secret Life of the American Teenager all in one movie? And, in fact, for the first half an hour or so of The Descendants, I felt vindicated. Clooney’s narration as he watched his family spiral into dysfunction was predictable and heavy-handed, and we’ve seen the Hollywood “oh-I-need-to-be-a-dad-now” plot device before. Where, then, does Descendants make up for the slow start? In short, everywhere else.
Matt King (Clooney), absent father of two young girls, finds himself lurched from the comfortable position of “parent understudy” to lead role, as he puts it — a terrifying prospect. Matt’s wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) is comatose as a result of a tragic boating accident. The movie opens with a silent, gorgeous expanse of Elizabeth jet skiing and laughing, completely elated, and that’s the last we see of her alive without life support. From there, we dive into the messy world of Matt’s inheritances — a gigantic expanse of untouched Hawaiian land, two feisty daughters, his daughter’s dopey boyfriend, endless cousins in aloha shirts and Laird Hamilton, to name a few. This is Sofia Coppola’s aimless Somewhere with plot and purpose.
The Descendants really gets rolling when Matt’s daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley of Secret Life infamy) lets him know that Elizabeth has been cheating on him — just another casualty of Matt’s careless ways. Director and writer Alexander Payne’s revenge subplot allows him to inject humor into his script, tastefully executed even in scenes in Elizabeth’s hospital room. Payne’s humor is organic and believable enough to almost miss it — in one brief poolside scene, ten-year-old Scottie wears a shirt that says “I’m Still Drunk From Last Night” in bold letters. These are snapshots of real life: messy, unedited, funny.
Shailene Woodley’s turnaround from Secret Life to Alex King is nothing short of stunning. Clooney’s reputation is already established, but Woodley’s performance came out of nowhere and singularly defined the movie. While I never like to go into a movie with high expectations — “It’s up for all kinds of awards,” my father told me before we went — Woodley did not disappoint. Clooney, who usually goes for the role of the bachelor, successfully experiments in Descendants. At the beginning of the movie, he’s borderline despicable: with friends, family, health and more money than virtually anyone else on the island, he still seethes, “Paradise can fuck itself.” It takes almost two hours for Matt King to shed his solipsism, but we root for him every step of the way until he finally proves himself as a father.
Payne’s best decision with The Descendants was to avoid handing out life lessons to the audience. Instead of uniting extended family and friends in grief, Elizabeth’s accident creates insuperable boundaries. Matt and Alex learn to love one another, but both daughters curse openly; Alex’s grandfather punches her boyfriend in the face; Matt spends some of his last moments with Elizabeth screaming at her before she is taken off life support. Impending death creates a world of relativism in which almost anything goes and there are seemingly no consequences. Payne creates ugliness where comparable storylines go for unconvincing beauty.
I hate being told to carpe diem almost as much as I hate Sarah McLachlan’s sad pet commercials. I also uniformly avoid movies that I know will make me cry (and it doesn’t take much, because I shed a little tear the first time I watched Finding Nemo). But The Descendants is different somehow. Elizabeth’s inevitable death is a simple and quiet affair — Matt and his daughters sprinkle her ashes into the clear Hawaiian sea and go home. There is tragedy, but mostly there’s readjustment. The King family has taken on a new shape and Payne allows us to cry or roll our eyes or leave the movie with a newfound sense of thankfulness, but he won’t ever beat us over the head with it. I love that. The Descendants believes in “less is more” without becoming plotless. And for what it’s worth, both of my sisters and my mother were all crying by the time the credits rolled — not to mention an entire theater of octogenarians — and I didn’t choke up once.
