By Patricia Ducey. Early on in The Descendants, the camera sweeps lovingly over the old family portraits that line the walls of Matt King’s Oahu den. His forebearers, among them a landed Hawaiian princess and her Caucasian husband – along with their many ambitious, high achieving progeny – stare back at us radiating a self-possession and grandness we soon realize is sorely missing from Matt’s present day world.
Matt King (George Clooney) practices law and lives a middle class existence on Oahu with his family, a wife and two daughters, whom he barely relates to. He and his many cousins are heirs to the huge coastline land grant left to them by their royal and self-made ancestors – but the law mandates that they must now dissolve the trust, so they must sell the huge estate to who they decide as a family is the best buyer. The meeting will take place soon. Oh yes, I think hopefully, this will be grand: a large, wealthy family in conflict as they grapple with the meaning of legacy and of the land in this last piece of American wilderness.
But then Payne switches to Matt’s domestic crisis; his wife Elizabeth after a boating accident lies in a coma, and weak, ineffectual Matt must rise to the role of father and husband –because the one parent who made the family work is unconscious. As the family story takes over, Payne, the visual poet of Middle America and middle age, goes a bit sideways; his excursion into the tropical Eden and Matt’s discontent is not as successful as his previous films. In Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways his Midwestern protagonists feel the dissatisfactions of less than fully lived lives out there in flyover country, but they eventually claw their way out of despair through action or love.
Matt King is not so lucky, or perhaps not so brave. He retrieves his wanton teenage daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) from the boarding school that is attempting, unsuccessfully, to reform her. Matt is determined that he and Alexandra, and younger girl Scottie (Amara Miller), will face the end of Elizabeth’s life together as a family. The doctor has informed him her coma is hopeless; they will remove the breathing tube per Elizabeth’s prior instructions. Both girls are bratty and foul mouthed; they humiliate and disobey their father just for the pure sport of it — because in his bumbling immaturity he allows them to, playing the ineffectual father to their faux maturity. In short, they represent the now clichéd American family, Hollywood version.
Alexandra is particularly angry with her mother, and she finally tells her father why: her mother was having an affair — something Matt, in his detachment, never even remotely suspected. Finally, Matt is furious; he confronts Elizabeth’s friends and they reveal his identity. He knows this is his chance to step up as man of action. Instead, he enlists daughter Alexandra’s help to find the man and confront him! This is something a teenager would do — and why would a man involve his daughter in the pathetic exercise of stalking her mother’s lover? Surely all hell will break loose, I surmise, and Matt will see his errors and grow up. Alas, when he and Alexandra find the hapless lover, Matt instead gives him a good talking to and then invites him to visit his dying wife in the hospital, despite the fact that the lover admits that for him the affair was not serious. At this point, I emotionally checked out. Even the plain spoken eloquence of Robert Forster as Elizabeth’s father, and the crackling life force of Woodley’s Alexandra were not enough to sustain this movie. Continue reading LFM Review: The Descendants
