Rare treat

Imbued with dollops of humour, Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is about life and its many crises and how to deal with them pragmatically

Not for a long time has Hollywood dealt with human relationships of the rich and famous as sensitively as Alexander Payne’s The Descendants where Matt King (George Clooney) is a busy lawyer and an absentee father to his two precocious daughters but has to soon change his profile when his wife Elizabeth gets into a coma after a boating accident.

Ten-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) is known to throw tantrums and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) was recently on drugs. To make things worse, he finds out that his wife was cheating on him. Owning ancestral property in picturesque Hawaii, his cousins are just waiting for him, as the main trustee, to dispose it off.

Based on a novel by Hawaiian Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants is about life and its many crises and how to deal with them pragmatically but it avoids getting bogged down in melodrama and is imbued with dollops of humour with Clooney cast in a different role from his earlier suave, unflappable roles.

George Clooney does an admirable job but Shailene Woodley steals the show with a compelling performance

Set in the paradise of Hawaii, Waikiki and nearby enchanting places, it gives cinematographer Phedon Papamichael enough scope to indulge in the beauty of nature and Christopher Young’s tuneful music, yodelling et al, gives it a further fillip.

Director Alexander Payne throws up some interesting tragic-comic situations. There’s one of the grandma mixing her daughter Elizabeth’s name with that of the Queen and grandpa (Robert Forster) and Alexandra’s boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause) underlining the generation gap.

The encounter with the offending lover Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard) is sensitively handled as is his wife Julie’s (Judy Greer) reaction. There is also one outstanding sequence of Alexandra’s underwater reaction to her grief at knowing of her mother’s illness brilliantly shot by Don King. Packing so much stuff in 115 minutes is indeed creditable though the ending is unduly prolonged and detracts much from the overall effect.

George Clooney does an admirable job and has been nominated for the Best Actor and is expected to face stiff competition from his rivals, but it is Shailene Woodley who steals the show with a compelling, versatile performance as a disturbed teenager. Patricia Hastie has the unenviable job of looking comatose as Elizabeth but there are fetching cameos.

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