Culture

Director: Alexander Payne

The Descendants opens with Matt King (George Clooney) - the wealthy descendant of Hawaiian royalty - sitting with his comatose wife Elizabeth questioning how he is going to raise his two daughters, having been the “understudy” parent for the last decade. A rocky situation gets even rockier with the arrival of the as yet absent 17-year-old daughter Alex, who drops the bombshell of Elizabeth’s infidelity.

The interlocking story shifts between Matt’s sale of the historically owned ‘King family’ land, and each individual character coming to terms with the betrayal and subsequent death of the matriarch of the family. Alex, the angst-ridden teen, is less saddened by the loss of her mother than the relationship that never was. Ten year-old Scottie copes by text-bullying her classmates, and throwing the word ‘whore’ around a lot. King is stuck between both hate and love for his wife, displayed by Clooney as a (kind of annoying) hesitant indecision that he displays throughout the film.

The Descendants is a masterpiece of cinematography, especially the brilliant footage of untouched and native Hawaiian landscapes, and the loose wandering style of filming in each scene. Although it has a reasonably poignant narrative, is punctured by hilarious moments, and is incredibly filmed and littered with great performances, the film somehow didn’t quite hit the spot. The family melodrama was weakly portrayed, and avoided delving into the multiple central themes of the film - death, infidelity and Alzheimer’s disease.

My first reaction, when I finally had one, was to laugh, which seems a bit strange for a film hailed as one of this year’s best dramas. Instead of exploring and resolving the issues at hand, the message the film left came across as “it’s ok when someone dies as long as you were mad at them.”