Theater Whore: The Descendants

Last night I had the pleasure of seeing the new film The Descendants. This was an amazing movie and another example of there being a lot of great films coming out this year and not being advertised until a week before they hit theaters. Before I start this I have to let you all know that this will be full of spoilers. The reviews of this have tried not to do this but you cant really cover this without revealing key elements. I also know that people read shit and forget it so by the time you all watch this you wont remember half of what I wrote.

George Clooney (Three Kings, Michael Clayton, Ides Of March) stars as Matt King. He’s a father, lawyer, and land owner. His family has owned a giant chunk of land in Hawaii for well over a century and he and his cousins have several years to sell the land and are striking while they can get half a billion dollars for it. I’m getting ahead of myself. The movie starts off with a woman, who you find out is his wife Elizabeth, riding in a speed boat and smiling. You will learn to hate this woman. Matt is raising his daughter Scottie and working constantly. His wife ends up getting a traumatic brain injury while speed boating and is in a coma.

Matt decides to pick his daughter Alexandria up from school. She is played by Shailene Woodley (The Secret Life Of An American Teenager, The OC, The District). When Matt arrives at her boarding school she is getting drunk with a classmate. She’s rude, curses constantly, and has no respect for her father. Matt discovers that his wife was cheating on him after he tells Alexandria that her mothers condition will never improve and that she signed something in her will that she did not want to be a vegetable. She will be dead soon and the daughter reveals that the reason she hates her mother is because of her affair. Matt runs out of the house and confronts his wife’s best friend and it turns out she knew about the affair and attempts to defend it.

Matt goes to talk to his wife’s parents. Her father Scott played by Robert Forster (Police Story, Heroes, Mulholland Dr.) hates Matt and wastes no time reminding him of it. To him his daughter was an angel and could do no wrong. Oh, I have to mention Sid! This kid is a friend of Matt’s daughter and has no filter. He laughs when Scott’s wife who is suffering from dementia thinks that they are visiting the queen. “I’m gonna hit you” is all Scott says. Then he does. Later Elizabeth sees a realty ad featuring a man who turns out to be the one her mother had an affair with. Matt plans to meet with him and eventually bumps into him while jogging. Something I really like about this is that even though it takes place in Hawaii they show that its just like any other place on the planet. There are people with real problems and real issues.

I’m gonna leave the review right here because there is so much more to this that I cant do justice with one blog. The confrontation between Matt and the man who slept with his wife is just so uncomfortable. How he deals with his cousins who want to sell the land. How he changes his behavior towards his daughter. What he says to his comatose wife. This was directed by Alexander Payne who also wrote and directed Sideways and Election which if you don’t know are great films. Check this out if you can. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.