About.com Rating

The Descendants opens with a snapshot of the sublime. A beautiful woman is shown in close-up, coasting along in a motorboat on a summer day. If Merriam-Webster needed a photo to accompany their definition of “content,” this would more than suffice. After a fade to black, director Alexander Payne slowly begins to reveal the human drama beneath this one perfect moment in time.

The image is quickly followed by an (offscreen) accident landing the woman in a coma, kept alive by machinery.

She is the wife of George Clooney's Matt King, a conservative and emotionally distant lawyer. Technically, King is royalty. His heritage traces back to the marriage of a settler and Hawaiian Princess. As such, he is the executor to a large parcel of undeveloped land on Kauai and has a cadre of cousins licking their chops at a forthcoming sale. The only thing native about him now are the floral shirts and an occasional “mahalo.”

The woman is also the mother of two daughters. Alex (Shailene Woodley) is 17 and sharp, though teetering on the edge of making lasting poor choices. Scottie (Amara Miller) is a ten year old scamp who says the danrdest things in the “Little Miss Sunshine” vein, but, you know, done a million times better.

Clooney is upfront with himself (and us) that he is the “back-up parent,” completely out of his depth. When he realizes that his wife has a living will that demands she be taken off life-support, he turns to Alex to help him with the preparations of alerting family and friends, and keeping an eye on Scottie.

It's here that Alex drops the bomb that Mom, in fact, was cheating on Dad.

The busywork of the rest of the picture deals with Clooney, Alex, Alex's dopey boyfriend and Scottie tracking down the mystery partner-in-adultery. Sure, Clooney would like to deck him, but he'd also like to extend him an opportunity to say good-bye.

It's a conceit that could only exist in the movies, but Clooney plays Matt King as so mild and so frustratingly reasonable that he sells it. Lucky thing, too, as this way The Descendants can hop from island to island as the characters slowly form stronger bonds that will be able to hold once Mom has left the picture.

The Descendants is a tear-jerker, that's for sure, but the peculiarities of the situation elevate this from a standard weepie to a genuine and genuinely engrossing story. The situation is weird, but never wacky. The characters have their idiosyncrasies, but they aren't quirky. On paper, this is Lifetime Network tripe, but in the theater, I was a blubbering mess that didn't feel manipulated. I simply cared.

The Descendants is something of a slight departure for Alexander Payne. Much like About Schmidt and Sideways it is a portrait of a man waking up from a life almost wasted. However it has far less of the nasty invective of those films, or of his others, the satires Citizen Ruth and Election. Maybe the raised life-and-death stakes of The Descendants puts the humanism in sharper focus, but it is a noticeable change. If the earlier films didn't sit right with you, you may still want to give this one a shot. But don't think he's selling-out for awards. He knows when to hold back, to keep the camera out of the room when it would be simply uncouth to intrude.

A final note on the music. Not since Jim Jarmusch's use of ska in Broken Flowers has a particular use of ethnic music, in this case acoustic Hawaiian, been so prevalent in a film. One could easily dismiss the slack-key guitar and island rhythms as “vacation tunes,” but the choices on The Descendants' soundtrack betrays the sadness that is a part of all life, even a life in paradise.