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George Clooney is a family man dealing with difficulty from The Descendants |
Director: Alexander Payne
Cast: George Clooney (Matt King), Shailene Woodley (Alex
King), Amara Miller (Scottie King), Nick Krause (Sid), Beau Bridges (Hugh),
Judy Greer (Julie Speer), Matthew Lillard (Brian Speer), Robert Forster
(Scott), Patricia Hastie (Elizabeth King)
Anyone expecting a straight comedy hasn’t been familiar
enough with Alexander Payne’s career. Payne’s movies are triumphant, slightly
quirky, explorations of crisis in the lives and emotions of middle-aged,
middle-class men. Few directors do it as well, bringing both a lightness of
touch and a profound understanding of the tragedy that can underpin ordinary
lives. He has an astute understanding of the pain of opportunities lost. And The Descendants is full of these, just
as it is full of the hope you can gain from seizing new opportunities in the
future.
Matt King (George Clooney) is a Honolulu attorney who is the
last trustee representative in his vast family for a site of 25,000 pristine
acres on Kauai. With the trust due to end, Matt is under pressure from his
family to sell the land for hundreds of millions and gain them all their
financial security. In the middle of this, his wife suffers a boat accident
that leaves her in an unrecoverable coma. Matt has to rebuild the relationship
with his two daughters Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) as
well as deal with the reveal this his wife was planning to leave him for her
lover, a married estate agent Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard).
Payne’s film is heartfelt, low-key and a marvellous showcase
for George Clooney who has probably never been better as the grieving and
shocked Matt, struggling to come to terms with revelations about his own life
that come completely out of the blue. In particular, his own realisation that
he has left far too much of his family life to his wife, and his wife has in
any case a less than perfect relationship with their two troubled children.
Alex (Shailene Woodley) has a history of substance abuse and hell-raising while
her sister Scottie (Amara Miller) is using bullying as a way of acting out.
King, its clear, has let his connection with his family drift away with his
consumption in his work, a character flaw that leaves him with a serious of
painful revelations about his own failures.
These revelations are expertly acted by Clooney, who gives
the part a rawness and edge beneath his natural charm that becomes deeply
involving. He makes Matt both desperate, bewildered and confused as well as kind,
decent and forgiving. Payne’s films never present easy solutions to problems,
and frequently hold up their leading characters as being the root of their own
troubles. It’s the case here as well, as King must learn to realise that many
of the problems he is discovering in his family life come out from his own
mistakes and lack of focus. How should he respond to his discovery of his
wife’s infidelity? How should he decide to react when he discovers his wife’s
lover had his own family?
It’s never the easy choice, and it’s never a clean and easy
solution that wraps everything up neatly. The problems we encounter will
eventually require us to make intelligent, emotional decisions and accept there
are no clean answers. When we meet Brian Speer, he’s not a bad guy just a bit
weak. It’s the same throughout. Every character has depth and hinterland.
Robert Forster as Matt’s father-in-law may seem foreboding and harsh – but then
he is perhaps right to blame Matt for his daughter’s unhappiness, even while he
never holds it too harshly against him. Alex’s spaced out boyfriend Sid (Nick
Krause) suddenly surprises Matt with his emotional insight into family
dynamics.
And of course, his daughters who seem tearaways are in fact
far more mature and supportive than might have been expected. Shailene Woodley
is excellent as Alex, a young woman who doesn’t blame but demands to be part of
solutions, and supports her father to make the tough calls. And the moral
problems keep coming, mixed with surrealist comic touches. It’s the sort of
film where Matt can make a shocking realisation about his wife, and then return
to his table in his restaurant to be assailed by a garish traditional music
band.
Despite all this Payne’s film captures a sense of affection
and warmth without succumbing to sentimentality or easy solutions. The sort of
satisfying outbursts of pain and cathartic anger are largely avoided for far
more mature and realistic feelings of joint responsibility for problems and an
acceptance that what our lives become are what we make of them as well as other
people. It’s a sort of complex avoidance of black-and-white solutions that help
to make the film feel truly real and grounded. While not many of us need to
worry about the pressures of making decisions that will make us millionaires,
all of us have had to deal with our own mistakes leading to others making
mistakes and the emotional fallout that this can bring.
In the centre of Payne’s emotionally intelligent film are
these excellent performances, with George Clooney hugely unlucky to miss out on
an Oscar for his emotionally intelligent and rich performance here. Payne’s
film takes the male mid-life and family crisis and subtly analyses from a host
of positions and angles, not just the man itself. We can feel sorry for a bloke
who has suffered blows but also see his own decisions have contributed to his
position. It makes for a delightful and heartfelt film, which is beautifully
made by Payne and superb showcase for intelligent, grown up film making.
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