Film Review: The Descendants

Alexander Payne has been making enjoyable dark comedies for a while now. Not a huge output, but with films like Election, About Schmidt and Sideways under his belt, quality far exceeds quantity. His latest, The Descendants, is a bit softer than those films, but is still enjoyable, with an outstanding lead performance.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a land baron living in Hawaii, trying to deal with the fallout of with his wife Elizabeth being in a coma after a jet ski accident. He's trying to re-connect with his daughters Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller), and things are made all the more complicated when he discovers Elizabeth was having an affair...

Clooney is truly superb as Matt. It's probably one of his best performances, and he perfectly captures every nuance on a character in a surreal situation such as he is in. I am hard pressed to think of any other actor that could have played him, such is the power of Clooney's performance.

The rest of the cast are good too, albeit with one or two slightly iffy casting decisions, with Beau Bridges being the main issue I had, playing one of Clooney's cousins, Hugh. In the films subplot, Clooney and the rest of his cousins have to make a decision on a land deal that would turn a Hawaiian beauty spot into a tourist are, full of houses and shops. Bridges just doesn't fit well into the film, I thought.

The writing is wonderful, and conveys nicely the sentiment that just because Hawaii is known as a tropical paradise, doesn't mean there aren't people there who have the same problems as the rest of us. But as stated earlier, it's all slightly more sentimental than you are used to with Payne.

Hawaii is shot brilliantly, in both ways you'd expect, the beaches, sea and tropical foliage we have all seen a million times in shows like Lost (shot in Hawaii) and Magnum P.I., to the suburbs of Hawaii, because real people do live there after all.

Overall, The Descendants did miss a little something for me. It's a marvelously acted film, with Clooney putting in a performance of a lifetime, and an intelligent, touching and witty script, but it just missed that extra edge you normally get in an Alexander Payne film.

****
A great film, although not up there with the directors other work. George Clooney is superb in the lead role though, and makes any other inadequacies with the film nearly irrelevant. Nearly.