In director Alexander Payne’s first film since Sideways, George Clooney seeks to care for his daughters in Hawaii after his wife is hospitalized, but then learns that she has been cheating on him. That news sends him on a quest that he defines along the way. To complicate things, his daughters are cooperative to various degrees. The heat is turned up even higher by a potential land deal that could make Clooney and his many entitled slacker cousins wildly rich, but the deal’s deadline looms and he is pressured by his VERY interested relations.
The situation is promising enough, but Payne takes the story in unanticipated directions. And, as you would expect from Sideways, there are many funny moments in The Descendants.
Clooney’s performance is brilliant. Here, he does not play The Coolest Man on the Planet. Instead, Clooney is a grinding workaholic who is so clueless about his kids that he doesn’t realize how clueless he is. He is stunned by news of the affair that he never suspected. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he must work through his situation figuring it out as he goes along.
Shailene Woodley’s performance as the older daughter is even more essential to the success of The Descendants. It’s not just that she perfectly plays a bratty teenager, but that we can see that some of her brattiness is hormonal and some of it is entirely voluntary and manipulative. Woodley had to convincingly play a character who is at times self-centered and shallow, but who can rally and reach within herself to serve as the family glue and support her dad and little sister.
The Descendants approaches being a perfect movie but for two things: 1) the daughter’s stoner boyfriend is just too oblivious to be credible among the other colorful yet completely authentic characters; and 2) the audience can never believe that there’s any chance that George Clooney is going to allow bulldozers on thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres. Still, almost perfect is pretty good.
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