A family can be a source of some of life’s biggest comforts or its biggest pains, depending on the individuals that compose it. For most of us, our families are some mixture of the two, consisting of a number of moments when you suspect that you might have been secretly adopted versus an equal number where your family can provide you with unconditional aid and support in your greatest time of need. The Descendants attempts to weave both of these threads into the warp and weft of its story, and succeeds in most of the ways that matter for a film. It falls slightly short of true greatness with a few moments of obvious artifice which detract from the whole, but it’s still a worthwhile journey that feels, for lack of a better description, real.
One of the ways in which The Descendants feels a bit disjointed lies in its reliance on one of the crutches that novel adaptations so often fall back on: exposition via voiceover narration. That isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, especially not when you’re listening to the sultry tones of a George Clooney, but the sheer density of the information that Clooney has to impart at the beginning of the film is somewhat daunting, and it feels as though the first 20 minutes or so of it largely feature him talking while the world of the film is introduced to us. Matt King’s family is in disarray, you see: his wife, from whom he was mildly estranged, is in a coma from a boating accident, and it’s up to him to rally his two daughters and attempt to be the father that he was failing to be before she was shuffled off to the hospital. It’s bad timing for him, as he’s the sole deciding factor in his extended family’s imminent decision to sell or not to sell a parcel of land on Hawai’i that may bring them up to half a billion dollars, an enterprise that understandably dominates his time.
Eventually the characters are introduced and the complications established: his wife Elizabeth is discovered to be vegetative, triggering a living will which will force her doctor to disconnect her life support; he also discovers from his older daughter that Elizabeth was having an affair at the time of her accident. Faced with multiple traumas buffeting him from all sides, the voiceover recedes entirely, and we’re left with King’s confused attempts to make some sense of the mess his life has become while also attempting to provide some kind of support to his daughters: Alexandra, a perhaps too world-weary 17-year-old, and Scottie, a 10-year-old who’s just learning how to react with middle fingers to things that she doesn’t like. As Matt puts it, “I wonder why the women in my life destroy themselves,” and he’s left with the rest of the film to try and arrest that procedure in his daughters while facing the climax of that impulse in his wife.
This is a family that seems to have spent time together at some point in the past, and retains a base level of familiarity with each other, but doesn’t seem to quite know what to make of each other. Clooney’s performance here is a special one that’s aided by a script that doesn’t force him into the obvious awards-season baiting that one might expect from the heightened drama of his circumstances: by turns befuddled and confused and angry, he convincingly portrays a man who simply does not know what to do in the situation he’s found himself in, and yet must do something for the sake of his daughters, if not his own sanity. There are shades of many of his best performances here: the goofy broadness of O Brother, Where Art Thou, the grieving sensibility of Solaris, the scrabbling curiousity of Michael Clayton. It’s a fine line that he’s asked to walk between playing for laughs and playing for tears, but he threads the needle superbly.
He’s aided in that by interacting with Shailene Woodley as Alexandra, a character that pulls off the tricky feat of surviving an unlikable introduction: at first she’s resentful and sullen and curses more than Matt would like, but eventually becomes Matt’s unlikely ally in the search for the man with whom his wife was having an affair. It’s, again, a role that calls for a Scooby Gang-ish sense of mystery, but also a genuine mournfulness for her mother, mingled with disdain at the choices she made. It’s a character that could’ve easily come across as annoying or false, but Woodley manages to stand her ground with Clooney, which is something few 20-year-old actresses would likely be capable of.
It’s a shame that Alexandra’s character is used as an excuse to bring in the weakest aspect of the film, namely her boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause), a lunkhead bro whom she insists accompany the family for a week’s worth of traveling and informing family members about Elizabeth’s impending death (his own, unseen family apparently willing to discard him for days at a time). His presence feels forced: he rarely has anything cogent to say about the circumstances the characters are in, and is often simply an observer standing in the background of scenes. When he does open his mouth, his comments are painful attempts at livening up the proceedings, e.g. by laughing at an Alzheimers patient’s weak grasp on reality or joking about a non-existent retarded brother, like some Greek chorus made of stupid. It’s a character that feels irrelevant, as if someone inserted him wholesale into a late draft of the script in order wring out laughs that aren’t necessarily required, and you often dread the moment when you realize he's going to say something.
That’s a shame, because this is a film that, while perhaps being marketed as a comedic drama, is much more about tone and situations than actual jokes. It’s one of those movies that you perhaps will remember as being funny without recalling ever laughing out loud while watching it. That’s not meant as an insult: it’s just not a film that necessarily needs to go for guffaws, and when it does, it can sometimes be difficult to take it seriously. It’s similar in that respect to director Alexander Payne’s last film, 2004’s Sideways, itself a novel adaptation and itself a fine balance of melancholy and wry observational humor, with elements of last year's excellent family drama, The Kids Are All Right, mixed in for good measure.
Still, when The Descendants works, it works beyond expectations. The script gives each character memorable lines without giving them that distractingly “written” feel, which leads to each of them feeling lived-in and real. The drama of the circumstances the characters are in is obvious, but it’s not over-extended solely for the sake of dramatics. That’s not to say that Payne doesn’t ensure that we know the stakes: Elizabeth is seen quite often in her hospital bed, at first kept alive by machines and then gradually writhing silently away in her coma as her organs shut down. It’s a somewhat harrowing image, a dead woman who’s still alive, but she acts as a kind of ticking clock for Matt and Alexandra, who feel the need to gain some kind of resolution to the problems that her death has brought to them before it even actually occurs.
The Descendants is not an overly complex film, but then its power is drawn from the relationships of its characters and less from the situations that they find themselves in; the latter are used as lenses to examine the former. In its willingness to dial down its pace and let its actors breath in the moments given them, it’s a refreshing counterpoint to the often exhaustingly high stakes of so many cinematic dramas. The notion of mourning someone who isn’t even dead, someone whom you loved but perhaps didn’t like, is a compelling one, full of mixed emotions and contradictory impulses. Payne’s grasp of character helps him fully realize his concept, and the result is a moving film, and one of the better family dramas to come along recently. It’s a mannered film, at its best when it’s understated and casual, and luckily that’s the tone that Payne knows to strike more often than not.
