It’s like my mother always told me about men: “Keep expectations low, so you won’t be disappointed.” (I’m lying, she never said that. Though I wish she had.) The winner of two Golden Globes and critics’ hearts the world over, Alexander Payne’s dramedy The Descendants proves frustrating not because it’s a bad film, but because it’s a flawed one labelled as perfection.
An unfeasibly long voice-over introduces Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer and trustee under pressure to sell his family’s paradisiacal Hawaiian land to a tourist developer. He’s also facing a personal crisis – an accident has left his wife Elizabeth comatose, and he must struggle not only to become the full-time dad he never was to his two daughters (including the fantastically mouthy and mature teenager Shailene Woodley), but to also emotionally navigate the revelation that Elizabeth was having an affair.
Like Payne’s Sideways and About Schmidt, The Descendants is a unique blend of comedy and emotional drama. The adulterous, comatose elephant in the room aside, Matt’s journey to recover a sense of heritage and parenthood are intriguing and subtly played. Just as he never shies from showing the touristy dinge of Hawaii, Payne wisely avoids ideals and extremes, eschewing melodrama by injecting plenty of humour into the film.
However, the humour also becomes the film’s downfall, as the honest, awkwardly human blunders can rapidly descend into farce. There are individual moments of real beauty, like when a passion-fuelled run becomes a deck-shoe hindered display of middle age. But with endless one-liners from precocious kids and an unbelievable Dumb And Dumber-style extra who laughs at Alzheimer’s sufferers, collectively these light moments reduce The Descendants to a film cheaper than the sum of its parts.
And while Clooney is impressive, putting Hollywood’s most desired bachelor in Simon Cowell-waisted khakis and declaring him an “awkward dad” is every bit as ridiculous as slapping some glasses and frizzy hair on Anne Hathaway and declaring her an “ugly duckling”. Want George at his finest? Rent Up In The Air instead.