The Descendants: Our Reactions

By Brodie Lancaster / October 14th, 2011 in Film / New York / 521 views

There’s no doubting Alexander Payne’s knack for crafting characters—that he gave us Tracy Flick in 1999′s Election and the “fucking Merlot!” outburst from Paul Giamatti in Sideways are proof enough of that—but in his most recent offering, we can’t help but be left wishing he knew more about who he was telling a story about.

The Descendants sees George Clooney playing Matt King, a litigator and family man in Hawaii. His wife Elizabeth (Patti Hastie) is in a coma after being thrown from a speedboat and he’s having difficulty disciplining his precocious young daughter Scottie (Amara Miller). When the doctors tell him they are unable to keep his wife on life support—in accordance with her wishes—he brings his elder daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) home from college to help him cope. Alexandra is rebellious in the most contrived sense of the word; she wears band t-shirts, drinks and shouts things like, “You can’t tell me what to do!” Matt’s obnoxious and tiresome narration tells us this is the first time he’s ever really had to care for the girls, but there’s little time to dwell on that once Alexandra breaks the news that she and her mother weren’t speaking to each other after she discovered Elizabeth had been cheating on Matt. After confronting their friends (played by the underused Mary Birdsong and Rob Huebel) about it, Matt sets out on a hunt to find the other man with Alexandra, Scottie and Sid (Nick Krause)—Alexandra’s friend and a weak stereotype of a surfer bro—in tow.

The Descendants has all the makings for a complex family dramedy—scenes in which George Clooney wears Hawaiian shirts and fist-bumps an insufferable dummy come right after emotional confessions of infidelity and paternal unpreparedness—but it’s not until 80 minutes in that the film picks up some steam and figures out where it’s going. At this point, we’re introduced to the other man (played by a shockingly grown up Matthew Lillard) and his wife (Judy Greer in one of few roles that offer her anything more than “sassy best friend” dialog) and Clooney actually gets to do anything.

The cast Payne’s assembled for the film is well above par, but the material they had to work with (a script co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash based on a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings) didn’t do any of them any favors. The dialog is trite and passionless, and Clooney’s narration does little but remind us that there was once a time when Payne could tell a man’s story without such obvious exposition.