"The Descendents" is the first film in seven years from writer / director Alexander Payne, best known for the excellent comedy / drama "Sideways." That's quite a gap between two films, but the two films together show that Payne is one of the best in the business at creating fleshed-out, well-developed characters that feel absolutely real. As far as "The Descendents" goes, it's one of the year's best films, and though it's far more drama than comedy it contains two of the year's most outstanding performances.
"The Descendents" revolves around the King family, specifically Matt King (George Clooney) and his two daughters, Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller). Matt is a Hawaiian real estate baron who has tried to instill a strict sense of work ethic in his kids, despite the fact that their family has an abundance of wealth and lives in paradise. But he's also never really connected with his daughters, and he's forced to come to grips with that when his wife is involved in a boating accident and falls into a coma. This event causes the Kings to have to deal with increasingly painful revelations, all while Matt is forced to decide whether to sell a large tract of unspoiled Hawaiian land that belongs to his extended family.
As I said in my opening, Payne is one of the absolute best filmmakers at creating realistic characters. The situations in this film are real situations that real people face every day...including people who live in the veritable paradise of Hawaii. As Matt says in an opening monologue, living in paradise doesn't make everyone's problems easier, and he quickly finds out that having a lot of money doesn't help much either...at least not with the painful situations that he and his daughters are forced to face. George Clooney perfectly captures every emotion that Matt goes through, from despair to anger to rage to frustration to hopelessness. This is absolutely his finest performance, one that is sure to garner him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and may well earn him his second Academy Award. As good as Clooney is, Shailene Woodley goes toe-to-toe with him every step of the way in one of the year's biggest breakout performances. Known mainly for her role on "The Secret Life of the American Teenager," Woodley has just as much of a range of emotional moments as Clooney, and she captures them just as well. It's not a star-making performance necessarily, but it definitely makes her an actress to keep an eye on for the next few years.
Payne is excellent at moving seamlessly between comedy and drama, as he showed in "Sideways." While that film is more comedic, "The Descendents" is much more serious, though it certainly has its funny moments. The situations the characters are in generally aren't funny, but sometimes the only way to deal with something is in comedic fashion, or at least in a fashion that looks comedic to a casual observer. That's the way much of the comedy plays out here, and the tonal shifts are seamless.
Overall, "The Descendents" is simply an excellent film, with some of the year's best and most realistic characters. The Hawaiian setting provides a gorgeous backdrop for this story that provides a nice escape, even if the situations the characters face are faced by real people every day.
"The Descendents" is rated R for language including some sexual references.
Running time: 115 minutes.
Released domestically on November 16, 2011, by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
3.5 stars out of 4.
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