The Descen­dants

Whether Up in the Air, incog­ni­to as The Amer­i­can or trapped in the polit­i­cal machin­ery of The Ides of March, George Clooney has cut a lone­some fig­ure of late. Now he’s turned fam­i­ly man in Alexan­der Payne’s long-await­ed direc­to­r­i­al return, The Descen­dants. But, in keep­ing with his cur­rent tem­pera­ment, it’s not exact­ly a cosy or con­ven­tion­al domes­tic guise.

Much like Jack Nicholson’s grouchy retiree in About Schmidt, Thomas Haden Church’s con­ceit­ed thesp and Paul Giamatti’s self-loathing school teacher in Side­ways, Clooney’s Matt King is a flawed pro­tag­o­nist. A filthy rich but thrifty lawyer liv­ing on one of Hawaii’s main islands, he’s about to hawk a plot of vir­gin coastal soil passed down by his ances­tors to one of two face­less con­do devel­op­ers. He’s also ​‘the back-up par­ent’, a self-assess­ment he’s forced to amend after a power­boat acci­dent leaves his wife Eliz­a­beth (Patri­cia Hastie) comatose.

With doc­tors fear­ing the worst, Matt takes it upon him­self to rec­om­pense and recon­nect with his two young daugh­ters – 10-year-old Scot­tie (Ama­ra Miller) and 17-year-old fire­brand Alexan­dra (the excel­lent Shai­lene Wood­ley). Play­ing patri­arch of his own spoiled par­adise isn’t going to be a bed of hibis­cus­es, how­ev­er. Not least after a gut-punch­ing rev­e­la­tion leaves him look­ing even more the fool. But while he might not have a clue, Matt’s not out for the count just yet.

The Descen­dants is fresh and very fun­ny, thanks large­ly to Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor’s zip­py adap­ta­tion of Kaui Hart Hem­mings’ source nov­el, and Clooney’s flum­moxed clown­ery. Yet Payne’s head-on exam­i­na­tion of each character’s per­son­al response to this cat­a­clysmic fam­i­ly episode also gives his film an all-impor­tant ten­der edge.

In one scene, Matt breaks some dev­as­tat­ing news about Elizabeth’s con­di­tion to Alex while she’s swim­ming lengths. Her response is to dive under, delib­er­ate­ly con­ceal­ing her anguish from her tact­less father and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly escap­ing the cru­el real­i­ty that’s just been dumped on her. But Payne doesn’t allow Alex to hide; he fol­lows her beneath the sur­face, cap­tur­ing her dis­traught reac­tion in a moment of ele­gant, refined clarity.

Lat­er, Matt locks him­self in Elizabeth’s hos­pi­tal room before expelling all of his pent-up guilt, resent­ment and frus­tra­tion in an explo­sive, teary dia­tribe aimed straight at his life­less wife. These scenes could quite eas­i­ly feel over­wrought or out of place in a film that large­ly avoids con­flict and melo­dra­ma. But their res­o­nance is tes­ta­ment both to Payne’s matu­ri­ty as a sto­ry­teller and his enam­elled artis­tic poise.

Whether or not The Descen­dants will enjoy a sim­i­lar shelf life to Side­ways is hard to say. It’s unlike­ly, but also some­what irrel­e­vant, at least as far as Payne is con­cerned. As some­one who has shown no incli­na­tion towards quan­ti­ty over qual­i­ty, the direc­tor looks set to keep doing things his way, to take his time and invest every last ounce of him­self in each new project. When the result is this good, that suits us just fine.