Fun With Thoughts

The Descendants

Tragedy, like comedy, is a sudden departure from the norm - and it’s not always clear which one you’re dealing with. It can be a matter for debate when things go terribly, terribly wrong whether the appropriate response is laughter or tears. Alexander Payne’s movies tend to exist right on that fine line, and that’s never been more true than in “The Descendants”.

George Clooney plays Matt King, a wealthy landowner in Hawaii with two daughters, a wife in a coma, and a big deal coming up in which he can make millions by allowing developers to crash bulldozers into acres of untouched coastline. He’s already got a lot on his plate when he learns that the wife - who’s boating accident interrupted years of marital misery - was having an affair. With a realtor. The kind who puts his face on his advertisements.

With his realistically smartass teenage daughter, his realistically confused younger daughter, and a realistically dufus-ish teenage boy along for the ride, Clooney sets out to find the guy. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, and neither do we. He’s a good man at his wit’s end - always a recipe for fun.

The real strength of this movie is the actors. Every role is perfectly cast, perfectly played - from Beau Bridges as a superficially friendly hippie cousin, to Robert Forster as an understandably dickish father-in-law. They all live in an island paradise and have a love for the land, but each one is implicated in the destruction of that paradise. It’s a metaphor for the march of time - an apt one, poignant, and funny because it’s so, so true.