REVIEW: Alexander Payne Provides For Us a Facile Movie About Complex Feelings within the Descendants

Alexander Payne’s The Descendants has nearly all you need for any male middle age-crisis movie, and much more: A large plot of unspoiled family land going to be offered off and away to designers, sullen teens, a wife inside a coma. Payne, in the first full-length feature since his 2004 apologia for spoiled wine snobs Sideways, pulls out all of the stops, including casting George Clooney, an actress who’s aging superbly but who nevertheless, fortunately, has permitted themself to appear his age. In Payne’s vision, many of these elements were most likely designed to equal to an image the most honesty. Rather, The Descendants is definitely an ultra-polished picture by which every emotion we’re designed to feel continues to be cued up well ahead of time. There’s nothing surprising or affecting about this. Not really Clooney, who works miracles using the periodic bit of dialogue, can help to save it. Clooney plays Matt King, a highly-off lawyer residing in Hawaii, where decades of his family have flourished. Within the movie’s early minutes, he lays everything out for all of us in voice-over: He and the cousins are going to possess a bang-wow on the huge stretch of unspoiled land that’s been in the household in excess of a century — it’s time for you to sell, and Matt is moving to shut the offer. That’s plenty for just about any one guy’s plate, but we learn that Matt’s wife, Elizabeth, continues to be laying unconscious for 23 days following a boating accident. In the voice-over, Matt comes clean with the truth that he hasn’t been an excellent husband or father, despite the fact that his actual transgressions remain vague, we are able to think that he’s devoted a lot time for you to his work that wife and family have frequently taken a back burner. Still, Matt’s precocious preteen daughter, Scottie (Amara Burns), appears pretty much-modified: She will get looking forward to eating ice-cream in the casual-classy club her father goes to, like a 10-year-old should. However, her 17-year-old sister Alex (Shailene Woodley) is really a pouty sort with a lot of mother issues. Because it works out, Elizabeth isn’t going to leave that coma. When Matt breaks this news to Alex, she confronts him with a little of insider information she’s been hiding: Elizabeth have been cheating on Matt — another guy works out to become a beaming slimeball of the real-estate agent, performed by Matthew Lillard — and Alex, with teen-daughter petulance and self-righteousness, is furious together with her. Matt seems to become less furious and much more simply hurt, and the attempts arrive at terms both together with his wife’s unfaithfulness and her approaching dying from the majority of The Descendants. Together, together with Alex’s half-obnoxious, half-truth-telling stoner friend (Nick Krause), Matt, Alex and Scottie put down on the journey of reconnection and healing, allegedly ameliorated by Payne-style ironic wisecracks. That’s the one thing about Payne: In pictures like Sideways contributing to Schmidt, he’s become away using the junkiest type of sentimentality by packing deadpan gags around it, like ice around a defunct seafood. Using The Descendants he shows full mastery of this technique, a significant achievement only when you're thinking that’s a positive thing. Payne modified the film, with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from Kaui Hart Hemmings’ novel of the identical title. But when he's any real feeling of these figures, he doesn’t allow it to show. We all know they are folks discomfort because we’re told, frequently, sometimes with words and often with the same as acting semaphore: When Matt informs Alex her mother is certainly likely to die — she’s going for a dip in the household pool — she falls underwater and her face crinkles into an overemotive grimace. The image doesn’t tangle with the concept that infidelity is really a complicated factor, and barely concedes that those who commit it aren’t always monsters. Within this story, the adulterers — a minimum of the one that isn’t inside a coma — appear to be as sleazy and untrustworthy as you possibly can, possibly as a means of creating the Clooney character more supportive. But that’s among the issues with these components, one which Payne doesn’t bother to offset: Clooney’s Matt pays lip service that he’s made mistakes — we heard it for the reason that opening voice-over, where it whizzed by inside a sentence or a couple of dialogue. His wife’s mistakes and inappropriate behavior would be the focus here (despite the fact that she will’t speak for herself), and also the construct turns Matt right into a sanctified victim. Which makes Payne’s job simpler — there’s you don't need to see people as unnecessarily complicated or problematic. Why saddle Clooney — an actress who’s able to delicate emotional complexity — having a character like this? It’s proof of Clooney’s gifts he plays Matt as not only a bit of flattened card board. He is doing possess a couple of good moments, and the carriage, particularly, is one thing to look at: His arms dangle awkwardly from his short-sleeved patterned t shirts he walks by having an easy, loping gait that isn’t exactly elegant. Clooney works tough to be credible, actually was, but he’s un-tied at each turn through the self-assured calculation from the film around him. For me personally, the film’s main pleasure was the look of Robert Forster, an actress attracted from obscurity by Quentin Tarantino for his great role in Jackie Brown. Since that time, Forster has made an appearance in movies as well as on TV in some places — he was wonderful within the too-short-resided TV series Karen Sisco — and Payne warrants credit for giving him a relatively sized supporting role here, as Matt’s taciturn father-in-law. (His surprise approach to coping with the bratty stoner Sid may be the movie’s most spontaneous and bracing moment, and it is strict, maybe since you don’t view it coming miles away.) When Forster is grousing on-screen, the film appears momentarily alive. He’s a classic-time grouch, a global from Payne’s hipster misanthrope masquerading like a humanist. Because Payne’s fascination with mankind may be the comfortable sort: He must know well ahead of time who’s good and who’s bad, because which makes everything a lot simpler, doesn’t it? The movie’s lovely, lilting soundtrack of Hawaiian music — supplied by artists including Gabby Pahinui, Ray Kane and Keola Beamer — feels as though a forced make an effort to layer some feeling to the material. The film, shot on location (the cinematographer is Phedon Papamichael), is gorgeous to check out, sun-drenched and golden in most the best ways. Nevertheless its warmth is at first glance. The Descendants on the face handles the finest struggles existence needs to offer: Unfaithfulness, grief, the realization that family members don’t always, or can’t always, fulfill even our most modest anticipation. Payne handles these subjects using the utmost confidence and facility. Which would be to say he doesn’t cope with them whatsoever. [Servings of this review made an appearance earlier, inside a different form, throughout Movieline’s coverage from the 2011 Toronto Film Festival.] Follow Stephanie Zacharek on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.