Film Review | The Descendants

The family moment

Somewhere around the quiet conclusion of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, its protagonist Matt King (George Clooney) bends down to kiss the ashen mouth of his comatose wife, and speaks to her— recites to her, rather, addressing the inert lady as “my love”. In Payne’s films, maudlin moments like these are not uncommon.

Among American writer-directors, Payne’s ability to embody unfettered emotion and gentle humour in the same narrative, often in the same scene, and often at the behest of a situation or character, is remarkable. In The Descendants, this balance is consummate, which is why the film is so enjoyable. Clooney is every bit the star, yet without the familiar trappings—he cultivates a dowdy gait in order to ease into the Payne universe. The writer-director, along with Clooney and the young actor Shailene Woodley, who plays King’s 17-year-old daughter, a reservoir of adolescent rage, make The Descendants worthy of every award nomination it gets this year.

We meet Matt inside a wired-up hospital cabin, where his wife is in a coma after she is injured in a boat accident. While grappling with his personal loss, Matt has to also confront his parental inadequacies. Seventeen-year-old Alex (Woodley) and 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), his daughters, are in the throes of difficult transitions. Scottie is a sulky bully, and Alex, an angry teenager taking solace in alcohol after discovering an unpalatable truth about her mother. The new family is torn asunder when Alex tells Matt what he didn’t know about his wife. While the new dynamics threaten the family’s stability, Matt, a successful lawyer, has to decide the fortunes of his ancestral Hawaii estate.

Clooney is entirely the man in crisis. Dialogues don’t always communicate his anger and despondence. The character’s fundamental impulse is goodness. His conscience takes him to a family he never thought he would meet, and to whom, almost against his wishes, he is drawn for a difficult resolution. The actor adopts a physical frumpiness, and stays true to his character’s understated courage. This is Clooney’s most mature performance since Michael Clayton (2007).

Woodley is a promising actor. The transformation of her character, from a defiant teenager to an accomplice in her father’s moral adventure, is a bit abrupt—it is one of the film’s convenient, forced transitions. But Woodley justifies this contrast with her obvious comfort with the role.

Payne’s story is based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. It’s a story that encompasses emotions when they are most confounding yet deep—which, it seems, humour can interpret best. Payne is a director with a stamp and this space, of communicating the remarkable in the often ridiculous American middle-class life, is uniquely his. His visual language in The Descendants is unobtrusive, and he has a disarming way of letting the narrative unfold. The surprises and twists are muted. Hawaii, always a postcard-garish place, is wet and sparse. The camera does not communicate more than the actors—each frame has the bare essentials, but without seeming like they are bereft of beauty.

A treat from one of Hollywood’s most confident directors.

The Descendants released in theatres on Friday.

sanjukta.s@livemint.com

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