Clooney and Woodley are stuck in low gear in The Descendants
* * (out of five stars) The Descendants. Written by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon & Jim Rash. Directed by Alexander Payne.
In Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004), the prickly wine aficionado played by Paul Giamatti condemns a lackluster glass of cabernet franc as “hollow, flabby, overripe.” This critic feels similarly let down by Payne’s flabby, overdue follow-up to Sideways, The Descendants. This half-hearted comedy-drama isn’t the worst thing in the world. Let’s call it an unremarkable bottle of wine that took way, way too long to get to the table, and subsequently suffers the consequences of over-anticipation.
The schlemiel this time is Matt King (George Clooney), a good-hearted but emotionally unavailable family guy who happens to own a few thousand acres of prime Hawaiian real estate. While he is busy deciding how to deal with the bevy of developers who covet his legacy, Matt’s wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) drifts into an affair with another man, and then into the path of a stationary object during a boating accident. She is now comatose and dying, forcing Matt to at last confront the superficiality of his relationships with her and his two daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller). Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants is basically the story of a man who belatedly realizes he’s sleep-walked through his life, and is not entirely sure he wants to wake up.
Payne is at least on to something in the premise. As Matt observes early on, the fact that he is a rich man living in a tropical paradise is no guarantee of happiness. More precisely, his advantages allow him to be as desperately unhappy as anybody else—just on a higher plateau. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he says in the film’s first five minutes, thereby setting us up for something a great deal edgier than Payne delivers.
Indeed, it’s hard to figure exactly what The Descendants wants to deliver. Aside from some odd moments, it’s not particularly funny. It won’t make you cry. Aside for a brief scene near the end, it offers no dramatic fireworks, no bravura performances that make good clips during the Oscar show. What narrative momentum it does have—such as when Matt decides he must seek out and confront his wife’s lover (Matthew Lillard)—is spent in very talky, very civilized scenes that are resolved in very talky, very civilized fashion. In short, it offers nothing like the catharsis in Sideways, as when Paul Giamatti grabs a bottle of bad wine and runs into the vineyards screaming for everyone to leave him alone.
Mostly, The Descendants seems content to be a somewhat quirky (but not too quirky) semi-comedy that somehow deserves our attention because it has heavy themes. Those themes don’t exactly weigh on its soul, exactly, but lie somewhere in its vicinity. It is to Payne's credit that he has produced a mature story here, for mature minds. But that doesn’t mean it needs to feel like a funeral reception, afraid to be too amusing or too loud—in short, to be too fun.
Don’t believe the hype that will undoubtedly attend George Clooney’s “slack key” performance. True, he proves he has the integrity to allow himself to be ordinary, to be the guy who wears Hawaiian shirts in Hawaii without irony—but is this really much of an accomplishment? Is his acceptable masculinity, the debonair charm of his Clooniness, really that common in the world that he must prove he can turn it off at will? Having Clooney play the schlump is like watching Scarlett Johansson fill penny-rolls in her sweatpants—possible, but why?
With its layered performances and rich quotability, Sideways is already on its way to full cult status. Election (1999) is also deservedly remembered. The Descendants isn’t Payne’s sophomore effort (as in “sophomore slump”), but it sure feels like it. Seven years is a long time to wait for a drink that is just “quaffable”.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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