The Descendants review

YOU could be forgiven for having preconceptions about a movie starring George Clooney and set in Hawaii. Poignant, profound and heartfelt with genuinely funny moments, The Descendants is a moving and quirky film and blissfully, without a tuxedo or car chase in sight.

Instead Clooney puts aside the slick, polished persona, to play a flawed, workaholic attorney who has lost touch with his wife and two daughters – Alex, aged 17 and 10-year-old Scottie. Bluntly describing himself as “the back-up parent, the understudy”, Matt King is called upon to step onto parenting centre stage when he is blindsided by events, namely a boating accident which leaves his wife Elizabeth in a coma.

Swiftly followed by the painful confirmation she will never regain consciousness and the inevitability of having to pull the plug, Matt reels from the revelation his wife had an affair. There can never be a good time for these things to happen but Matt is particularly distracted as the sole trustee of a family trust, which controls 25,000 acres of pristine land on the island of Kaua’i.

With the sale of the land imminent and the decision as to which developer will succeed in the sale left in his hands, Matt struggles with anger and betrayal  as he tries to connect with his daughters and attempts to track down the man his wife had an affair with.

The land sale of historic Hawaiian land becomes a delicate metaphor for the lives of Matt and his daughters, as a decision looms to either make millions in a development or protect 25,000 acres of land which has been in the family since the 1860s. But even the beauty of Hawaii takes a back seat to the subtleties of the family’s struggle to function and normalise the unthinkable.

With his youngest daughter acting out, Matt seeks help from the teenaged Alex, retrieving her from the boarding school which was hoped to help wean her off addictions to “drugs and older guys”. Played by Shailene Woodley, Alex gives a performance that will have parents everywhere wincing in sympathy for Matt. But despite her anger and typical teenage tendency towards obnoxious language, it is impossible not to ache in sympathy, particularly as she screams out her grief underwater in the family pool.

But despite somewhat inevitable tear-jerking moments, The Descendants is never self-indulgent. It is both refreshing and unusual to be able to laugh and cry at a film without feeling as if your emotions are being played with by a smug movie executive.

Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, Alexander Payne delivers the kind of understated look at mortality and family we have come to expect from the Oscar-winning director who gave us Sideways. The Descendants probes at the emotions of the human condition, exploring love, anger and betrayal and swinging from grief, jealousy and resentment to forgiveness.

Matt compares the archipelago to a family, distant and clustered but “always drifting slowly apart”, so it’s safe to assume the family’s unspoiled plot of Hawaiian land encapsulates the relationship he has with his daughters.

The bond isn’t shiny but it is very real, unpretentious and has undeniable beauty in a way that makes the film utterly believable. Beautifully acted, The Descendants traces the fracturing and healing that must take place if a family is to emerge from grief intact. This is a gem of a film.

Find out how to win free passes to see The Descendants with the SuperLiving Movie Club.