Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller
Directed by: Alexander Payne
Written by: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
Genre: Comedy, Drama

Matt King (Clooney) and his family are the fortunate heirs to one of the last areas of undeveloped Hawaiian land. All of Hawaii has their eyes on his family’s decision over whether or not to sell the land. That would be bad enough, be his wife has also just fallen into a coma after a boating accident, a coma that Matt learns is fatal. To top it off, his youngest daughter, Alex (Woodley), divulges that only a few months earlier, she caught her mother cheating on Matt with another man. The Kings thus set forth to cope with their wife/mother’s impending death, as well as confronting the man who made Matt into a cuckold.

It has been a very long wait since Alexander Payne has graced us with a film from his cannon of every-man characters; seven years in fact, since 2004’s Sideways. That time off (spent in development hell on another project) seems to only have made Payne’s intuition sharper. It should be noted that this is the first feature-length venture that Payne has embarked upon without writing partner Jim Taylor (who only acts as a producer here). The absence can be felt only in slight differences in humor, but where Taylor’s contributions are missed, a more delicate tone is substituted. Alexander Payne is the master of balancing comedy and drama as demonstrated flawlessly in About Schmidt and Sideways, but not so deftly as he exemplifies in The Descendants. The fine line separating the faces of comedy and tragedy is expertly blurred, and often within the same scene. In a way, Payne skewers broad comedies by demonstrating that even over-the-top actions need to have consequences if the story is going to work. And it’s this play between broad strokes of comedy and the resulting nuanced drama that gives the film its compelling tension.

George Clooney shows us a side of himself that we’ve never quite seen to this point. At times he appears like one of his hapless characters from a Coen Brothers’ film, but that caricature is always reeled in before it goes too far and asks Clooney to deliver a very complex and restrained performance. The balance is astonishingly involved. It also bears mentioning that Clooney has always played well with others onscreen, finding a lot of inspiration in his co-stars. Newcomer Shailene Woodley proves to be an unlikely and formidable partner in this film, as she, too, is required to play a myriad of emotions simultaneously.

In classic Payne fashion, his balance of story, character, and attention to tone keep this film light in spite of its heavy themes. It’s often hilarious and heart wrenching, but never overbearing. The Descendants is a penultimate example of a rare type of film that satisfies every aspect of the emotional gamut.

USA. 115 minutes. Rated R.

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