‘The Descendants’ presents difficult choices to its protagonist Matt King – accepting the impending end of his wife’s life versus hating her for cheating on him, selling thousands of acres of inherited property versus preserving it for the region’s future. In doing so it sends across a subtle, yet profound spiritual question – when nothing is permanent, can you hold onto something forever.The situation that the writers (author of the original novel, Kaui Hart Hemmings and Alexander Payne, one of the authors of the adapted screenplay) put the protagonist into has to be praised for its complexity. Matt is a lawyer who is the trustee of a family owned land that has to be sold as per the law of perpetuities, which forbids a testator from keeping a property from being distributed perpetually to ‘the descendants’. His wife hurts herself during a boating accident and is comatose and on life support, which must be removed shortly.
Matt is unsure of whether he has to grieve for her impending loss or be angry with her for cheating on him, a fact that he learns of from his teenage daughter. His relationship with his 2 daughters is difficult, with him having been a back-up father. He has to somehow manage the next few days and ease his wife to her death while dealing with his anger, confront her lover, hold his daughters together as they come to terms with their mother’s condition and take a decision on his ancestral property.
In addition to this, he has to deal with his older daughter’s obnoxious boyfriend, his father-in-law who blames him for her accident and his relatives, who are pressing him to sign on the dotted line to sell the property for which he is the signatory. In short, his cup runneth over.
The screenplay has an undertone of the morose, while keeping the surface very close to regular life. The setting of the film in Hawaii underlines the irony, for the stereotypical view of a holiday place is that everyone there is happy and everything is hunky dory with them. The film starts by bashing that very stereotype as Matt reveals to us his situation. I like movies that spend the first 10 minutes with a protagonist narrative that makes it clear to everyone.
The beauty of the film is in the way Payne gets his actors to live out these difficult days on screen with a balancing act so close to life, filled with judgments, biases, complicated relationships and so removed from screen life which is simpler and much more sorted.
George Clooney as Matt King is superbly understated and very convincing as the angry yet mournful husband, tottering father and unsure signatory, who finds in him a greater sense of responsibility than before. Performances by Shailene Woodley as the older daughter Alex and Amara Miller as the younger daughter Scottie and Nick Krause as Alex’s obnoxious boyfriend round up a stellar support cast.
‘The Descendants’ is a good watch for its realism and for the absolute difficulty of this situation.