Something to watch tonight: Thursday 5 June

The Descendants (Payne, 2011)

When The Holdovers came out at the end of 2023 we decided to have a rewatch of one of Alexander Payne’s earli­er pic­tures, The Descendants, which I remembered lik­ing but turned out to have writ­ten a luke­warm review of. (The games memor­ies play – I must have enjoyed it enough to actu­ally buy a copy when it came out on Blu-ray!) 

I really enjoyed Alexander Payne’s The Descendants – at least while I was watch­ing it. Some films will do that to you, though. They push all sorts of groovy but­tons while you are in the room but they dimin­ish as you re-examine them. Connections that you thought were there turn out to be illus­ory, a series of sat­is­fy­ing emo­tion­al moments don’t cohere into some­thing com­plete and you real­ise that you were enjoy­ing it so much you wished it into some­thing profound.

I blame Clooney. He’s such a watch­able pres­ence, always com­bin­ing that Cary Grant movie star-ness with an under­ly­ing emo­tion­al frailty. His char­ac­ters carry that square-jawed aspir­a­tion­al male solid­ity but rarely do they actu­ally know what is going on or what to do. He spe­cial­ises in people who are mak­ing it up as they go along and that has tre­mend­ous appeal – if George Clooney doesn’t know what he’s doing then none of us do.

In The Descendants, Clooney’s per­form­ance papers over the cracks in a story of a priv­ileged Hawai’i law­yer forced to con­front some big human issues. His wife is in a coma from a jet-ski acci­dent, he can’t seem to get through to his two daugh­ters and – to make mat­ters worse from his point of view – he was being cuck­olded by a real estate agent.

Individual scenes provide enough sur­prises and wry obser­va­tions to seem fresh, the non-Clooney per­form­ances range from fine (Shailene Woodley as the teen­age daugh­ter) to ter­rif­ic (Robert Forster as the father-in-law) and the screen­play by Payne and Nat Faxon has some won­der­ful moments. I think my main prob­lem is a res­ol­u­tion that sees Clooney’s char­ac­ter hav­ing made a decision and learnt some­thing – but it’s not clear exactly what.

That second (or pos­sibly third) watch con­firmed that The Descendants is much bet­ter – and more mov­ing – than I gave it cred­it for. I think I was going through a peri­od there where I felt I had to pick holes in things in order to be a prop­er critic. 

Another Payne film that I am very fond of is Downsizing which was recom­men­ded here back in September 2023.

Also reviewed in that February 2012 Capital Times column: David Fincher’s remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (“spir­ited and styl­ish”) and Jason Reitman’s excel­lent vehicle for Charlize Theron, Young Adult.

Where to watch The Descendants

Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland and UK : Streaming on Disney+

Canada: Digital rental

India: Digital rental

USA: Streaming on Max