Alexander Payne (2011)

I knew before seeing it:  (a) this was the story of a family in Hawaii and centred on the father Matt, a lawyer preoccupied with his work and emotionally neglectful of his daughters; (b) the family’s lives were turned upside down when the mother Elizabeth was injured in a powerboat accident; (c) Matt discovered that Elizabeth, now lying unconscious in hospital, had been unfaithful to him.  I assumed that, even so, Matt would, while his wife was out of the picture, learn to be the father he never had been, Kramer vs Kramer-style.  I didn’t know that it would soon be revealed that Elizabeth had suffered irreversible brain damage and that it was only a matter of time before her life support was turned off.  A long time, as it turns out:  The Descendants is tediously maudlin and it comes as a relief when the wife expires.  Before that happens, she’s been on the receiving end of angry and/or tearful bedside monologues from Matt, from her elder daughter Alex, and from the wife of the man with whom Elizabeth with had been having an affair.  The hospital room has also heard various exchanges of cross words between Elizabeth’s nearest and dearest.  There were moments when, listening to all these overwritten home truths, I felt the brain-dead patient was better off than the audience.  Still, the deathbed verbiage isn’t as bad as Matt’s voiceover, which dominates the early stages, as he explains situations and characters which are already obvious.  On his way to pick up Alex from her boarding school on ‘another island’, he looks down from the plane window at the ocean and islands and muses that, ‘A family feels exactly like an archipelago … separate but part of a whole and always drifting slowly apart’.  This insight seems to be enough to shame even Alexander Payne and his co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (their screenplay is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings).  After a while, the voiceover is heard no more.

Payne had a deserved success with his last feature Sideways – a comedy with depth and a secure tone – but The Descendants is much more like his previous feature About Schmidt, which veered clumsily between poignancy and easy laughs.  This latest effort also recalls not only Kramer vs Kramer but another multi-Oscar winner of the period, James Brooks’ Terms of Endearment, which  Pauline Kael summed up as follows:  ‘At the end, the picture says, “You can go home now–you’ve laughed, you’ve cried.” What’s infuriating about it is its calculated humanity.’  I neither laughed nor cried during The Descendants (seeing it less than a week after War Horse underlines how unaffecting it is) but this shallow, unoriginal film is getting plenty of praise and prizes.  One reason may be that, while this kind of stuff – an unhappy middle-class family moves through crisis into a sadder-and-wiser, tentatively hopeful tomorrow – was a nearly annual feature of the Academy Awards thirty years ago (Kramer vs Kramer, Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, Terms of Endearment in the space of five years), it hasn’t had the same Oscar-winning prominence in more recent times.  (It’s noticeable that, as in Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People, the family in The Descendants finds its salvation in reuniting father and children, and getting rid of a problematic mother.)  Perhaps the most depressing aspect of The Descendants is that it can be seen as refreshingly different from most of what else is around now.  The second most depressing aspect is the lead performance.

George Clooney is notoriously not a family man in real life and he hasn’t been a father in his best-known film roles to date (except, somewhat incidentally, in Syriana – and in Fantastic Mr Fox).  This is why his work here is getting such accolades.   It’s the casting-against-type path to glory:   Clooney isn’t playing someone with a handicap or in the physical disguise that is often the best way of an established star’s getting a different kind of attention.  But, as Matt King in The Descendants, he’s not himself.  There are moments in the early stages when he’s impressive – as when a doctor tells him Elizabeth’s condition is hopeless and Matt’s face goes dead and he disappears inside himself for a few seconds.  But, for the most part, Clooney’s acting is unusually effortful.  This is because he’s straining for human depth that certainly isn’t supplied by the script and possibly isn’t accessible to him as an actor.  He’s often compared with Cary Grant and, although the comparison is facile and in some respects inaccurate, they do share, I think, an ability to make essentially shallow characters magnetic and fully engaging.  Up in the Air isn’t eventually a satisfactory film but Clooney’s brilliant performance in it seems to sum up his complex appeal.   Watching tears appear repeatedly in his eyes and eventually trickle down his face in The Descendants feels to me almost like a betrayal of this appeal yet George Clooney trying to be a conscientious husband and father seems to be reassuring to a lot of people.  The attempt gives him a new (bogus) dignity and maturity.  It’s bad enough when Oscars are awarded to actors who aren’t very good.  It’s infuriating when they go to those who usually are but not in the roles that win the prize (the Sean Penn in Mystic River syndrome).

The title of The Descendants refers both to Matt’s daughters and to the King family more largely – wealthy landowners in Hawaii for several generations.   The film’s subplot concerns the Kings’ plans to sell 25,000 acres of unspoilt land on the island of Kaua’i for development.  Needless to say, reappraisal of his priorities causes second thoughts in Matt’s mind about this bigger inheritance picture.  In time-honoured melodramatic fashion, he decides not to go ahead with the sale at the moment when his pen is poised to sign the deal.   Alexander Payne doesn’t bother to show us what happens when Matt is put in the tricky position of having to explain his decision to a public meeting of his large extended family, which will mostly be hostile to the news of his U-turn.  This omission is in striking contrast to an earlier scene when he rounds up the neighbourhood to inform them, his voice trembling with emotion, that Elizabeth is on the way out.   Since Matt is meant to be so preoccupied with work and money that he doesn’t notice what’s going on his close family, this speech to the massed ranks of the Kings’ ‘dear friends’ makes no sense – beyond providing George Clooney with another opportunity to show his underdeveloped sensitive side.   The Descendants is very lazily plotted.  I can’t pretend to regret that the tensions between Matt and his elder daughter aren’t resolved slowly and painfully but, as it takes only a scene or two for them to be getting on fine, you wonder what the problem was in the first place.   Seventeen-year-old Alex has a boyfriend called Sid who, at first, is alarmingly boorish.  On a visit with Matt and his daughters to Elizabeth’s parents, Sid laughs at something the mother says, failing to understand that she has advanced dementia (as if no one would have explained that to him beforehand).  But, once he and Matt have gone through a couple of regulation spats, Sid turns simply affable.  (I’d briefly dropped off at the time but Sally explains that the official turning point occurs when Sid reveals to Matt that his own father died recently:  in other words, he too has known pain and loss and so must be a decent human being.)   The younger child, Scottie, is ten yet she’s entirely unconcerned by her mother’s condition and incurious about whether it’s going to change.   This is purely in order that, when the doctors break it to Scottie that Elizabeth is about to die, the child can be taken by heartrending surprise.  I expected the screenplay to be as manipulative, but not as perfunctory, as it turns out to be.

Shailene Woodley (Alex) and Amara Miller (Scottie) are good as the daughters, although the appeal of the younger girl often depends on the familiar idea of having a little kid say outrageous things (as if these can’t be hurtful coming from one so young).  Woodley doesn’t try and ingratiate herself and there’s a mildly interesting dissonance in the suggestion that Alex’s new-found enthusiasm for her father is impelled less by love for him than by a desire to expose her mother’s adultery.  Nick Krause is Sid and Elizabeth’s lover Brian is played by Matthew Lillard:  this is a thankless role to start with and casting an actor whose face is not his fortune seems a cheap shot.  (You seem to be meant to think:  how could Elizabeth cheat on George Clooney with a man that looks like that?)  Until her ludicrous outburst in the hospital, Judy Greer gives a nicely judged performance as Brian’s wife.  Although it’s an obvious one, Robert Forster brings some grit to the role of Elizabeth’s adoring, ornery father and Beau Bridges gives flavour to his two scenes as one of Matt’s many cousins, all involved in discussions about selling the land.   The other cousins include a mysteriously wordless Michael Ontkean.  (According to Wikipedia, he now lives on Hawaii so maybe he just turned up for the occasion.)  The beautiful landscape is photographed by Phedon Papamichael but the film isn’t visually inventive.   The two images I think I’ll remember are both underwater ones.   The first is when Matt breaks the news about Elizabeth to Alex.  She’s in a swimming pool and she goes under to keep her initial reaction to herself (even so, the moment might be more expressive if we saw her disappear and reappear and were left to imagine her face in the intervening seconds below the surface of the pool).  The second is after Matt and the girls throw Elizabeth’s ashes into the sea, and leis along with them.  We see the submarine garlands and, beside them, a white shape.  The younger child has asked at an earlier point, ‘Can I swim with the sharks?’, and for a second I thought it was a shark we were seeing and what a remarkable composition this was.  But it’s only the underside of the boat.

28 January 2012