For an actor as compelling as George Clooney, he’s the kind of matinee idol who has been asked only on the rarest of occasions to stretch his abilities behind his chiseled-hunk personality type.
My two favorite performances of his – in Michael Clayton and Up in the Air – were both Clooneyfied: minor deviations from his smooth, fast-talking persona. Even his Batman was less Batman than George Clooney.
So, in a career that can best be described as variations on a theme, Clooney’s leading role in The Descendants is a true breakthrough. Never has he played a man so unconfident, so unsure of himself, so emotionally fraught with conflicting emotions dancing across his harried face simultaneously.
His gray hair prominent, he’s gangly and disheveled in more ways than one, poised perpetually at his tether’s end. When he says to his 17- and 10-year-old children, “It’s like you kids don’t respect authority,” it’s a flaccid revelation, perfectly delivered without any authority whatsoever.
His character is Matt King, an affluent real estate-transaction lawyer in Honolulu whose wife Elizabeth, we’re told in the opening narration, has been rendered comatose after a boating accident. Her condition deteriorating, Matt has to prepare for the worst, and breaking the news to his pair of frequently delinquent children is only the beginning. New revelations surface that make Matt, whose marriage was already on the rocks, rethink his relationship with Elizabeth, ultimately prompting a flight to Kaua’i.
Adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants is the first feature from Alexander Payne since 2004’s Sideways, and it’s well worth the wait. This is a deliberately paced studio movie for grown-ups, the kind of film Lawrence Kasdan used to make in his prime, operating irrespective of genre and even audience accessibility.
It turns every convention of the funereal weepie on its head, finding humor in sorrow and pain in love. Payne revels in the frailties, hypocrisies and hidden courage of his characters, and all of them emerge as three-dimensional people, even the ones that seem, at first, to be comic props.
I’m a little shaky on the use of voice-over narration, on which Payne relies a bit too much (it’s the most obvious nod to the film’s novelistic origins) in the opening third of the picture, because it tends to spell things out for an unthinking audience. But by the time Payne abandons that device, it’s smooth, brilliant sailing.
As for the film’s location, I can probably count all the Hawaiian-set movies I’ve seen on fewer than two hands, and of them only a small fraction view the islands as anything more than tourist playgrounds. Here, Phedon Papamichael’s sometimes gorgeous, postcard cinematography belies the basic ordinariness of the film’s recurring locales: anonymous highways, hospital interiors, suburban housing developments, tony private residences that just as easily could have been the domain of a Boca country club.
The Descendants’ soundtrack is just as unconventional – which is to say authentically Hawaiian – with lovely, Hawaiian-language acoustic music by Gabby Pahinui and Keola Beamer underscoring the action.
Sideways was one of the more mature movies of the past 10 years, but it’s almost infantile compared to The Descendants. This proves more than ever that Payne is a deft handler of changing emotional tides; he explores multiple moods and textures with lived-in effectiveness. It’s no shock, when assessing the totality of this affecting picture, that he has elicited from Clooney the performance of his life.
When the actor finally turns on the water works, it’s natural and beautiful, never calculated in that familiar “Show me the Oscar” expressiveness. Don’t be surprised if they grant him one anyway.
THE DESCENDANTS. Director: Alexander Payne; Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Lillard, Beau Bridges, Matt Corboy, Robert Forster; Distributor: Fox; Rating: R; Opens: Wednesday at most area theaters