The Descendants is a film about adultery, death and bad parenting, with a side-element concerning race and real-estate in Hawaii. It is directed and co-written by Alexander Payne, who rose to fame with the terrific 1999 satire, Election. None of his subsequent films have been quite as good, though the Oscar-winning Sideways had its pleasures.
All Payne's movies are centered on hapless middle-aged or late-middle-aged men, and the cynicism apparent in his debut has increasingly curdled into the misanthropic contempt that made his About Schmidt a sour experience.
His latest is an adaptation of a novel by the Hawaiian writer, Kaui Hart Hemmings. It is about Matt King (George Clooney), a wealthy, part-Hawaiian lawyer who is wrestling with whether to sell the virgin forests that he and his cousins have inherited. He is also dealing with the fact that his risk-taking wife has had a boating accident and is in a coma from which she is unlikely to recover. This means looking after his difficult 10- and 17-year old daughters full-time. If that were not bad enough, he discovers that his wife had been having an affair.
Matt has apparently been so caught up in his legal work, despite the laid-back, flowery shirted Hawaiian lifestyle, that he barely knows his kids and has no clue how to talk to them. His fatherly incompetence pushes credulity and he is generally such a pathetic pushover that it is hard to believe him as a successful lawyer.
