I HAVE MOVED

Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for reading CinemaSlants these few years. I have moved my writing over to a new blog: The Screen Addict. You can find it here: http://thescreenaddict.com/.

I hope you follow me to my new location! You can find an explanation for the move on that site now or on the CinemaSlants Facebook page.

Friday, December 2, 2011

The Descendants (2011)



Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is all about getting past the exterior; how things may not always be as they outwardly appear. This extends even to the film’s Hawaiian setting, and how what most deem to be “paradise” is actually far less glamorous once you live there for your entire life. The Descendants is focused less on the sun, ocean and beauty of Hawaii than it is focused on the stuffy offices, hospital rooms and cloudy days. The people are no less deceptive. When a character or a situation is introduced to us in the film, they seem to be little more than stereotypes. Only later do we find out that this first impression was misleading. This is the thesis of The Descendants, and it’s a captivating one. It’s unfortunate that the film itself frequently forces certain developments and tries to spell things out way too clearly. For proof, look no further than the first ten minutes, which delivers the entirety of the exposition through cringe-inducing voiceover. It gets mostly better from there, but The Descendants remains frustratingly uneven throughout. It has several great moments, and it’s performed beautifully, but I’m not convinced it’s a great movie.


George Clooney stars as Matt King, a wealthy Hawaiian lawyer whose wife just went into a coma after a devastating boating accident. Now he is left alone to care for both his daughters—one young (Amara Miller) and one a teenager (Shailene Woodley)—and tell all his wife’s loved ones the news that she may not make it out alive. Matt is also the sole trustee of a large portion of Hawaiian land, and he plans on selling it to a developer along with a large group of his cousins. He spends the entire movie juggling his family, the hospital, business, and sudden questions about his wife’s fidelity. Of course, the movie is less about plot and more about living amongst the characters for a short period of time. It has a Tom McCarthy-esque sense of place and character, and on that level it is an unqualified success. The characters here are, more or less, incredibly well-developed.

The Descendents is far less successful at transporting the characters from one emotional beat to the next. In that arena, the film frequently feels incredibly forced. It’s very easy to buy who these people are and their relationships with one another, but their behavior always seems like it is being determined by writers as opposed to the way things actually would go. One of the most jarring instances comes toward the end of the film’s second act, when Clooney decides to have a surprisingly deep conversation with a certain other character that doesn’t feel like it would actually ever happen. This second character is someone Clooney doesn’t particularly trust or like, yet he’s suddenly opening up and asking him for advice out of nowhere. It’s a small moment, but it’s little things like that which most bugged me when watching The Descendants. This is a movie where everything should feel effortless, but too often things seemed predetermined by the laws of crowd-pleasing screenwriting.

None of this is the fault of the actors, who give tremendous performances across the board. Clooney will get the most press because he’s, well, George Clooney—and he’s great—but the supporting work is what really ties it all together. Both daughters are terrific (Woodley in particular is a revelation), Robert Forster stops by and knocks it out of the park for a few scenes, and even Matthew Lillard returns from the dead and does some nice work. Everyone just seems like an actual human being, with all the fragility that suggests. They’re all dealing with their own struggles, but they continue on with a façade of happiness and resilience. Just as the Hawaii of The Descendants is anything but paradise, these people try to seem composed and in control, but in reality may be falling apart at the seams.

These performances, along with the mostly-impressive direction of Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways) do their best to cover up the flaws in the film’s skeleton. The Descendants looks and often feels like a great movie, and it has enough moments that are superb, but there were just too many elements of the film’s story that didn’t feel as natural as it should have. The script was written by Payne along with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (Dean Pelton from Community) and it—like the movie itself—is a frustrating mix of good and bad. For every intelligent and poignant scene in the film, there’s another that fails to live up to potential. The Descendants is quite good at balancing tragedy and humor without causing tonal whiplash—it’s on par with 50/50 in that regard—but I just wish that the journey of the characters was given at least one more re-write. Payne and his actors do an excellent job of creating an utterly real Hawaiian environment with fleshed-out characters. The movie around them isn’t quite as convincing.

Grade: B-

No comments:

Post a Comment