The Descendants

Synopsis: When the wife of Matt King (George Clooney) is left in a coma after a boating accident, he must deal with his two daughters of whom he knows little. He also happens to be one of the descendants of Hawaiian royalty and the sole trustee of  an inheritance that has left him and his relatives owners of a considerable slice of prime real estate that is up for tender and the sale of which will make them all rich. Quite a lot for one guy.

Director and co-writer Alexander Payne has said: “It's my hope that we're getting into an era where the value of a film is based on its proximity to real life rather than its distance from it. To do that, you need actors - stars, basically - who don't necessarily look like Ben Affleck”.

He might have added “or George Clooney”. He didn’t, but the one question you’ll want to ask of him after seeing The Descendants is “why not?” When the rest of his very good cast are virtually all unknowns (a small role for Beau Bridges being the stand-out exception) and consistently average looking, the presence of can’t-drag-your-eyes-away-he’s-so-good-looking George somewhat skews the proximity to real life which Payne alleges to be his yardstick. And this is not just pedantry: Payne gives us a large helping of to-camera close ups of Clooney, his big melting chocolate brown eyes staring unblinkingly at us as if challenging us to stop gazing at him. Which is not to say that Clooney is bad in the part. He’s not. He’s very good in a Cary Grantish sort of way  - that is, no matter whether stricken by grief or consumed by rage he remains physically composed, daggy Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops aside, carefully groomed and always George Clooney.

Whilst The Descendants isn’t realism in the emotionally-wracking sense of Blue Valentine (2010), let alone European cinema verité, in terms of Payne’s quoted aspiration it is admittedly closer to the real world than the standard Hollywood fare. Payne does human frailty very well.  His previous film, Sideways (2004) along with About Schmidt (2002) and Election (1999), were delightfully understated accounts of the foibles and follies of ordinary schlubs trying to come to grips with their lives. The Descendants is very much in this vein but Payne has lifted the bar significantly and tried to capture the skein of life in all it messiness. One would have to say that he has largely achieved his goal, deftly drawing his characters and the tangled relationships between them, although it is exactly in the process of showing us the grand design (albeit more of a non-design) that he has had to sacrifice the realism to which he aspires, an irony which he would no doubt appreciate.

It is interesting (at least to me) that the American critics have gone into raptures over this film. Perhaps compared to the endlessly repeating variants on larger-than-life action extravaganzas and witless comedies to which they are subjected, the neatly packaged melancholy subject matter and small candours of Payne’s film does strike them, much as did American Beauty (1999) in its day, as profoundly revealing. I doubt it will have quite the same effect here but nevertheless The Descendants is unquestionably entertaining if a little too smoothly conventional to be called realism.

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