Film review: Grief feels overly pleasant in ‘The Descendants’

Beau Bridges (left) and George Clooney talk family business in The Descendants.

By Josh Bell

Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011 | 1:05 p.m.

The Details

The Descendants

George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller

Directed by Alexander Payne

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: The Descendants

Rotten Tomatoes: The Descendants

Filmmaker Alexander Payne debuted in 1996 with the deeply cynical dark comedy Citizen Ruth, and since then his films have gotten progressively softer and more emotional. The Descendants, Payne’s first movie since 2004, is easily his most sentimental yet, with virtually no trace of the black humor that defined early Payne films Ruth, Election and About Schmidt.

A lot of The Descendants is affecting, but its mushier tone is often less emotionally resonant than the bitter sarcasm of Payne’s earlier work. As he did in Sideways, Payne here explores the plight of a depressed middle-aged white guy, lawyer and millionaire heir Matt King (George Clooney). Matt’s wife is in a coma following a boating accident, and he’s left trying to care for their two daughters while dealing with the demands of friends and family who want to say goodbye before she’s taken off life support. Plus, he’s just discovered that his wife had been having an affair, and he’s in the midst of navigating a massive land deal.

For somebody under so much pressure, Matt is a little too calm, and Clooney’s inherent cool actually works against his performance, making it hard to connect with this guy as a husband and father whose life is falling apart. But there’s a lot of warmth to the family dynamic, and Shailene Woodley does a great job as Matt’s rebellious but empathetic teenage daughter Alexandra. The heavier emotional moments sometimes fall flat, but the casual vibe of Matt and his daughters hanging out feels genuine. And Judy Greer conveys nearly enough grief for all of the other characters combined in one devastating scene as the wife of the man Matt’s wife was sleeping with.

The humor here is gentler and more easygoing than in Payne’s other films, and some of it, especially Alexandra’s stoner-doofus boyfriend Sid, feels out of place. Set in Hawaii, The Descendants captures a rich sense of the state beyond typical tourist destinations, and that lived-in feel—whether in locations or relationships or jokes—is the movie’s biggest asset. It’s a welcoming, open-hearted film, but a story like this should probably sting a little more.