My friend Colin said the The Descendants was uneven; Gillian said disappointing. I wasn't excited going in, expecting a fine but minor domestic drama. And that's what I got. I'm most surprised that Clooney picked such a benign project. This is the guy who did the first real biting movie about the Gulf War, the guy who small-talked J-Lo from a car trunk and into his hotel bed. This guy shot his girlfriend in the back of the head and left her in the snow. This is the second movie that Clooney's gone everyman but Up In The Air was far superior. That other movie captured the anxiety of employment in a climate of recession and the anxiety of being that type of 2000s emotionally-absent male. The Descendants has, arguably, an even loftier agenda. It's about real grief, cuckoldry, and parental-anxiety. The Descendants aims higher than Up in the Air, but falls harder.
Matt King (Clooney) is both a successful lawyer and the trustee of a billion-dollar plot of Hawaiian land. It belonged to his white grandfather and native-Hawaiian grandmother and Matt's family's ownership will soon expire. It's his responsibility, therefore, to sell the land and make millions for his relatives, both the current generations and those coming. The beachfront plot, untouched, is to become a resort, golf course, and shopping centre. It's a major sale that, considered on its own, is a strain on Matt. But it's secondary to the other challenge in his life: his wife is brain-dead and dying. There's his own grief to manage, but also that of his 10-year-old daughter Scottie and his 17-year-old daughter Alexandra. Grief gets even more complicated when Alexandra tells her father that she'd caught her mother, before the fatal boating-accident, having an affair.
It's been a bit since a movie with this high a profile – after all it stars Clooney and has Alexander Payne directing – has been set in Hawaii. I remember being there in the 1990s. There's a chain of convenience stores called ABC. I ate poi. At my mom's home now, you'll find a photo of me and my brother, a live parrot lying flat on our palms. We each have on a flower-lei and there's a caption at the bottom that reads Aloha 1993. Probably paid the guy ten bucks to snap that picture. In Hawaii, there's an intersection, more distinct than that in any other place I've vacationed, of pastoral-beauty and tourist-camp. Matt frequents an open air restaurant on Waikiki beach. Trophied swordfish mounted on the walls to go along with the view of the all-white sands and blue waters. The culture, too, reflects the dichotomy. At a meeting regarding the land-sale, Matt's relatives debate fine-print, their intensity set-off by floral-print button-down shortsleeve-shirts and cargo-shorts.
So Payne has a rich setting with which to work, but as the movie proceeds, he seems to lay it on a bit too thick. Every transition, every shot meant to show passing time, shows Hawaiian nature. In between a scene of Matt berating his unconscious wife for cheating on him, and, say, a scene of Matt at his law office, there is a montage of a high cliff, some waves hitting sand, and a set of bright red flowers. At some point, Hawaii changes from atmosphere and metaphor to distraction. Almost a crutch, even. It's as if Payne knows that the best thing he's got going in The Descendants is Hawaii and he leans hard.
The emotions are similarly heavy-handed. There is a comatose wife / mother at the center of this story. She never moves or says anything, just lays taut in a hospital bed as people speak to her or over her. There's browned-stained gauze taped to her throat and her hands grip rolled towels. There are often close-ups of her, which, in their ugliness, eventually become as distracting as the close-ups of the beauty of the Hawaiian flora. The shots of the woman occur during moments meant to be poignant. For instance, when Alexandra yells at her mother on her first visit after discovering she (her mother) will never wake up: "Sorry we were never good enough for you." In another scene, Matt speaks at a gathering and tells the crowd that his wife will not survive. Her friends, people we've never seen, tear up. Blurred heads lower in the foreground of the shot. At one point during the gathering, as Matt drinks Jameson's in the corner of his living room, a teenage acquaintance tries his best at consolation: "It really sucks." Ugliness, but ugly in the most comfortable and, therefore, most mundane way. This is a tourist-trek around grief, a $10 photo of a mom's / wife's death.
Scottie, played by Amara Miller, is the only true grief in the movie. Childhood grief is often wordless, all actions and gesture. Alexander Hemon, in his New Yorker piece about his baby with cancer, describes how his 3-year-old daughter reacted to her little sister’s diagnosis: “She didn’t complain or cry; she understood, as well as any three-year-old could, the difficulty of our predicament.” Among all the monologues and the over-the-top shots of the dying woman, there are Scottie's little movements. She throws the pool-furniture into the pool without any expression on her face. She's angry and she doesn't really know why. Eventually, a grief counselor tells Scottie the truth. Unfortunately, the scene plays out in the hospital room as sad ukulele plays on the soundtrack. The councilor's words are inaudible under the non-diagetic music until we hear, "Your mother's going to die." Scottie is able to cut through the melodrama and give a small nod at "Do you understand?" before turning to her father. A slight nod at the truest pace.
The grief is not just sketched, it's clipped, too. The film isn't elegant in synthesizing the subplots of the dying woman, Matt's mission to find his wife's lover (Matt expresses a pretty casual nonchalance when he finally meets the man), and the land-sale. "For some reason," he says, "I've been made trustee of this land." He says that he didn't do anything to deserve or earn it, but it's his responsibility. His new single-parenthood also just-happened. He asks what chance his daughters have with just him to guide them. A good question, one filled with all the unknowingness of being a parent. The Descendants, though, gives only a cursory answer. The Descendants, yeah, but no ascending or transcending going on here.
