Wilmington on DVD: The Descendants, Melancholia, The Adventures of Tintin, My ...
The Descendants (A)
U.S.: Alexander Payne, 2011, Fox Searchlight
Good things can be a long time coming. It took director-writer Alexander Payne seven years to make a new film after his Oscar-winning/box-office/critical triumph with Sideways in 2004.
The Descendants is a perfect George Clooney role and movie. Everything that makes him attractive on screen -- likeability, smarts, vulnerability, earnestness in the face of chaos, that wry sense of being at the center of things but not letting it carry him away, and the ability to kid himself -- is present in the character he's playing here: Matthew King. King, a Honolulu lawyer, comes from an old respected (Anglo) Hawaiian family, and is the trustee of a 25,000-acre stretch of mountain, forests and beach on Kauai that the majority of his more spendthrift, less affluent cousins (headed by Beau Bridges, near-perfect in a wily slob role as Matthew's cuz Hugh) want him to sell.
First, though, Matthew has to handle a family tragedy in the making. His adventurous wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) sustained grievous head injuries in a water skiing accident off Waikiki and now lies comatose, on life support. She is due to be unplugged, as per her own wishes, after the doctors' unanimous verdict that she will never wake up. This leaves Matthew in charge of his two daughters, the impudent, mouthy-beyond-her-years 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and rebellious and willful 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) -- an obligation complicated by Scottie's precociously foul mouth and Alex's propensity for drugs and booze, and her insistence on the presence, during the crisis, of her seemingly dull-witted weedhead boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause).