Filmbook: "The Descendants" (2011)

Instead of drawing together in crisis, the King family seems to be drifting apart: Father Matt (George Clooney) has just found out that his wife Elizabeth, who has been in a coma since a sailboat accident a few weeks earlier, is not improving and her doctor is bound to the Do Not Resuscitate order she signed before she died. Matt must now break the news to family and friends, as well as to his daughters, troublemaker Alex (Shailene Woodley) and the just-tipping-toward-rebellion Scottie (Amara Miller).


Having let his wife take the lead with their daughters throughout their marriage, Matt finds himself performing the motions of parenting without any idea of what he's being called to do. At the same time, he's managing the sale of his extended family's ancestral parcel of land, a small decision that comes to overlap with his family crisis in an unexpected way.

This movie kind of snuck up on me with its greatness. I was expecting it to be good, but I wasn't expecting to be still thinking about it weeks after I saw it. Clooney, Woodley, Miller and Nick Krause as Alex's dopey friend Sid (Krause must have been created in a lab exactly to play Sid, he's just exactly right) are unquestionably the ensemble cast of the year. I think the kids were actually toned down somewhat from the novel to be less obnoxious, but it works here. (And no motherfucking Mr. Mom jokes. It has to be said! Thanks for not going there!)

I wouldn't agree with people who are saying this is Payne's most mature film -- but it holds a few punches in some key moments, although it delivers on others. (The confrontation on the bungalow porch is just so brutally well done, but well counterbalanced by the scene with Judy Greer's character in the hospital.) It's his most family-centric movie, which is not to say it's family-friendly, but puts the whole clan under the same microscope where he stuck Tracy Flick and Miles Raymond. Clooney anchors it extremely well, though; this is his best performance in years, and it's almost a shame he'll probably be crowded out at Oscar time.

I had never heard of Kaui Hart Hemmings' debut novel THE DESCENDANTS before Alexander Payne (of "Election" and "Sideways" fame) was trotting out his adaptation of it, and the book proved somewhat hard to find in stores, so much so that I gave up and bought the movie tie-in. The adaptation is funnier and less introspective, but the novel isn't at all ponderous -- just a little more reflective in ways that might have been conveyed over more voiceover than Payne employed. If anything, the book digs a little deeper into Matt and his wife's marriage, and to Matt's consciousness as a several-generation Hawaiian who as gone, in his words, "haole as fuck," but I appreciated that Payne's film didn't lean too far into flashback.

Filmbook Verdict: Read the book and see the movie.