Trouble in paradise
George Clooney is at his best as a widower in moving, funny tragicomedy
George Clooney is not an island.
Early on in The Descendants, there’s an unexpectedly rich moment involving the story’s protagonist (Matt King, played by George Clooney). He’s just gotten some more very bad news of a very personal sort, and his reaction is to bolt from the house and run down a curving suburban street to his neighboring in-laws’ place. He’s wearing flip-flops (the setting is Hawaii) and he runs in an oddly comical and ungainly fashion.
The blend of comedy and sorrow, pathos and panic in that moment is characteristic of the entire picture, and it’s also a signature moment for the character. King/Clooney is a Hawaiian businessman, soon-to-be-widowed father of two troubled daughters, head of a clan whose roots in Hawaii go back to the 19th century. He’s a mild sort of take-charge guy who’s also a bit of a clueless doofus, a moderately shrewd pater familias but casually ineffectual and oblivious as a husband and father.
The role may seem somewhat unusual for Clooney, but it provides the occasion for the most nuanced and wide-ranging performance I’ve seen from him. And it’s no mere star-turn: writer-director Alexander Payne (Sideways) puts Clooney/King at the center of things here, but the center in this case is always part of a larger and ever more entangled situation.
And that larger situation takes in quite a lot: King’s comatose and dying wife, the sorrows and travails of the two young (and already motherless) daughters, the belated discovery of the wife’s infidelity, and the impending sale of virgin wilderness that has belonged to the King clan for more than a century. It’s the stuff of soap opera and tragic melodrama, but Payne and company enliven and complicate all that by taking it in yet another direction—toward the comedy of contemporary middle-class manners.
Adapted (by Payne and two co-writers) from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, the story has a casual abundance that proves both disarming and engaging. Each of the plot strands involves a test of regions of King’s character that he has heretofore neglected, and the zig-zag path of his quirky integrity is comically crucial but never independent of the tougher issues involved.
And that comic trajectory never stands apart from at least a half-dozen other characters, most of whom turn out—sooner or later—to be more complicated and interesting—and humane—than we might have guessed from the stereotypical sit-com first impressions that most of them make.
The daughters, teenaged Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and pre-teen Scottie (Amara Miller), are prime examples, as are King’s grumbly father-in-law (Robert Forster) and Alexandra’s hulking boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause). There’s an edgy, shambling ambiguity in Cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges) and fresh little deflected nuances in Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), the real estate agent who has cuckolded King, as well as in Julie Speer (Judy Greer), his unsuspecting wife.
