The Descendants

The Descendants -- Although I admire Alexander Payne, the director of The Descendants (2011), I must concede some faint disappointment with respect to his latest film. The movie is excellent, continuously entertaining, and very precisely acted. Payne’s subject – a woman’s coma and protracted death – although inherently tragic, is approached from a slightly askew, wry angle and the well-absorbed machinations of various family members at her deathbed is just sufficiently comic to ward off the encroaching darkness. Critics have said that the Hawaiian settings for the film are convincingly gritty and eschew ordinary clichés about the beauties of that state. This is completely untrue. If The Descendants were set in Milwaukee in the winter-time or the trailer courts of Little Rock, the gloom intrinsic to the plot would swallow any satire or levity intended by the director. Payne’s ironic eye stages a version of Et in Arcadio ego – death also haunts the paradise in the Pacific and the spectacular estates, beaches, cloud-smeared mountains, and blossoming orchids act to mitigate the horror of the film’s situation and make the human comedy, that might otherwise be overwhelmed, possible. Payne purports to hyper-realism and his films must be judged on the plausibility of the characters that he presents. As everyone knows, George Clooney plays a lawyer whose wife is in persistent vegetative coma as a result of a boating accident. Gathering family members at the dying woman’s bedside, Clooney’s character discovers that his wife was actively prosecuting a love affair with a realtor. The realtor is implicated in a subplot that never exactly comes into focus – Clooney and his family are astonishingly wealthy due to their ownership of a huge tract of unspoiled mountain and shore on the island of Kauai. Because the trust holding this property will be dissolved in accord with the Rule against Perpetuities, the family, consisting of innumerable (and, for some reason, mostly male) cousins, must cooperate to find a buyer for the idyllic beachfront property. Novels are more capacious than movies and, I suppose, that the book wove the theme of the real estate transaction, apparently a metaphor for being rooted and native to a place, around and through the domestic drama ensuing from the sudden, unanticipated injury and languishing of the hero’s erring wife. The marriage of these themes is probably subtle and meaningful in the source novel; in the film, we can’t see exactly how the two strands in the plot actually relate to one another. And, in fact, the husband’s decision to defer the inevitable sale of the edenic beach and mountain land, although presented as a noble gesture, comes across as essentially mean-spirited – by refusing the transaction, Clooney’s character denies a hefty commission to the hustler-realtor who was his late wife’s suitor and, I suppose, bars the land from access by the unwashed multitudes including those of us who have paid to see this movie. And, since the land will have to be sold in any event, nothing is accomplished by the gesture. It’s a curiously non-dramatic denoument – deferral as opposed to resolution of that plot point. Payne’s penetration into his characters is frequently profound. He doesn’t believe in villains and, as in Renoir films, “everyone has his reasons” for the way that he behaves. Crass characters show moments of tender kindness; sweet characters momentarily devolve into ugly rage and bitterness. As is often the case with Payne, the canvas is generously Dickensian and, in many respects, the less important figures in the story are the most vivid and interesting. But I have two problems with the film. The first is George Clooney. Clooney’s performance is masterful and vibrant – he shows a thousand different shades of vanity, humiliated pride, and wounded sympathy. Clooney has enormous, expressive eyes and he has a trick of masking emotion in the lower half of his face while showing his feelings in his huge, moist, movie-star orbs. But the adjective “movie-star” as used in this context is the problem. Clooney is simply too magnificently beautiful to seem like an ordinary man. He can’t look disheveled or harried no matter how hard he tries – the famous teaser scene where he runs in flip-flops is transparently an attempt to make the glamorous movie icon seem weak and humiliated – but it doesn’t work, Clooney’s gait while he runs is weird-looking but he is still a world-famous movie star. Every shot featuring Clooney, no matter how well-acted, remains a shot that is primarily about George Clooney. The film would have been far better with someone like Paul Giamatta in the main role. This is not to detract from Clooney’s performance but, merely, to note that he is miscast. The movie should have cast him as the real estate broker. And since about 40% of the film is comprised of close-ups of Clooney this is a serious deficit. Even more problematic is Payne’s periodic lapses into over-explicit, and, I think, vulgar sentimentality. We can construe how people feel from the situation. Accordingly, it is tactless and vulgar to use huge close-ups to dramatize emotional states that can be inferred and that are better imagined that shown. In one scene, a tough-cookie character plunges underwater in a swimming pool to hide her anguish. We know what she is doing and so it is jarring when the camera suddenly goes underwater to shoot the character’s grief that she hid by submerging herself. This is a lapse of tact and taste. Similarly, I don’t need a huge close-up of Clooney shedding a tear over the unresponsive visage of his comatose wife. It’s also unnecessary to use close-ups to show me the face of a little girl who has just been told that her mother will never wake-up. And, when a lei is thrown in the water as part of the woman’s funeral, we don’t need a showy reverse angle shot from beneath the waves of the floral garland silhouetted against the sun – this is pure sentimental kitsch. Dickens is sentimental too, I suppose, and, in this genre, you have to accept over-emphatic sentiment as part of the terrain – but I think Payne’s otherwise fine film would have been better without these kinds of highlights.