THE DESCENDANTS
Now playing at Fifth Avenue Cinemas and International Village
Matt King is going through a midlife crisis: he's conflicted about selling off 25,000 acres of family land; he's detached from his offspring, and, as it turns out, has been even less in touch with his wife. But at least he has his hair.
That's all I took away from The Descendants by Alexander Payne, the man who got to the heart of wine snobbery in Sideways. The film is framed as a comedy-drama in the trailer, which features some perky ukuleleplucking in the background as Clooney's head pops up from behind some shrubbery, but instead is a serious film about betrayal, grief and family dysfunction.
Clooney plays Matt, who in addition to the issues mentioned above, is also dealing with a wife who has been in a coma for 23 days, and may not recover. Plus, it seems that Elizabeth was having an extra-marital affair. The self-described "backup parent" is now responsible for his two girls, aged 17 and 10 (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) who seem to have had issues long before mommy had her accident.
We wonder if it's Matt who's been in a coma for the last 17 years. He seems so detached from his girls-foul-mouthed messes both-that we assume he lives apart. Instead, we're told that he just works a lot, which seems to be justification for Elizabeth's affair, but surely doesn't explain why the girls treat their dad with so much contempt.
After all, Matt seems to be the more sensible parent: he inherited a strong work ethic from his father, and believes that when it comes to money and children, a parent needs to "give them enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing." It's the best line of the movie, but Matt - let's call him Doormatt-seems to have lost the point in his rhetoric.
Apparently filmmakers thought that we would have a difficult time accepting George Clooney as a cuckolded husband, and so made him as dorky a dad as possible, with pants a little too high and the world's most boring Hawaiian shirts. Clooney, trying desperately to lose his signature poise and polish, clumps around like a Neanderthal, whether he's running on the beach or just trying to stay erect. It's distracting.
There are no surprises to be had in this picture, which paints the characters in black and white, rather than in shades of grey. Matt is the victim here, righteous and alone. All their friends are on his wife's side. Matt's father-in-law (an excellent Robert Forster) hates him. Adultery is bad, so the other man (Matthew Lillard) is presented as a sleazy real estate agent, who may or may not have pursued Elizabeth to cash in on an upcoming real estate deal. Plus, he's "not very articulate" according to Matt, who mocks the man to his face. And Sid (Nick Krause) is so moronic a character that he ruins every scene he's in. This isn't Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure, after all.
Matt is so entirely blameless-aided by Clooney's hangdog expressions-that two things happen: he starts to grate on our nerves because he never stands up for himself, and we kind of hate the other characters (yes, even the 10-year-old who keeps flipping her father the bird) with whom we should sympathize.
There are too many morbid shots of the dying woman, as if to wring last-minute sympathy from the audience where the script failed to do so. It means the farewell scene between Matt and his wife (which should have been a three-hanky affair) seems inauthentic.
Clooney is capable of comedy and drama, but Payne's script, adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, allows him to do neither well, in a flat little film where the landscape is far more interesting that the people who inhabit it.
