The Descendants film review

The Descendants film review (c) Vintage Digital (p) GoUK.com

What

The Descendants film review

When

January 2012

Where

At cinemas UK wide

The Review

Just released in the UK, The Descendants - directed by Alexander Payne and starring George Clooney – is a film in which the title and the plot have only a passing interest in each other.

The film title refers to the central character, Matt King (played by George Clooney), being the sole trustee – working on behalf of his extended family – of a large plot of land in Hawaii, thanks to a family inheritance dating back to the 1860s.

Although the film refers to the prospective sale of the land in a number of scenes, little attention is paid to the significance of the ancestors/descendants and their attachment to the land and its culture in the main body of the film’s narrative.

The film instead focuses on how George Clooney deals with his comatose wife, who is fated to die just as soon as her life support machines are turned off, and how he has to reconnect with the two daughters that long hours of work have estranged him from.

As his wife teeters on the cusp of mortality, George finds out that she had been having an affair with an estate agent, and the majority of the film sees George tracking the estate agent down and finally confronting him in the most genteel way he can manage.

The film starts by George telling us that Hawaii is not paradise on earth: that the people who live on the islands suffer all the ills of everyday life that everyone else on the face of the planet has to deal with.

It then goes on to hammer this home by shots of shockingly mundane cityscapes and architecture, and a sorry array of fashion mistakes that are capped by a hideous range of Hawaiian shirts.

George, it seems, is right: Hawaii certainly is not paradise.

But wait one minute, maybe George is telling fibs.

Maybe Hawaii really is paradise after all.

First, George is faced with one miscreant prepubescent daughter and one surly teenage hellraiser.

These are bad, troublesome, difficult kids.

Every parent knows that troubled kids like these two need a lot of time, love and patience to work out their anger and their problems.

But not on Hawaii. No siree, Bob.

On Hawaii, all it takes is one short scene and the girls are both transformed from deranged daughters to perfect princesses in the blink of an eye.

And then there’s the dying wife.

George gathers family and friends together to give them the news that the doctors are about to switch off his wife’s life support system, and on the very day that the plug is pulled (knowing that his wife has just hours or days at most to live) George decides to hop off to another island for a little sojourn.

Conveniently, the wife does the decent thing and hangs on until George returns from his trip so that he can finally say goodbye to her.

With serendipitous timing like that, Hawaii really has got to be paradise on earth, hasn’t it?

George Clooney has been nominated for an Oscar for playing Matt King.

He does a good enough job, but there’s nothing particularly remarkable about his acting, and he is, in many regards, let down by a flabby storyline and even flabbier directing.

He’s also undermined a little by scene-stealing Beau Bridges (cousin Hugh) and Judy Greer (Julie Speer – wife to the man who George’s wife had been having an affair with) who inhabits her role with understated ease.

The Descendants has been described as being both funny and sad.

Judging by the response of the audience, it was funny once (when George ran down the street in clattering sandals) and not sad at all.

With the wife’s ashes scattered at sea, the film ends with George sitting on the sofa with his two daughters either side of him.

The three of them share two bowls of ice cream and one blanket.

It is enough to make Lassie cover her eyes with her paws.

All in all, this is a wet-evening-DVD-film.

The Descendants film review rating

2 stars