There is a little bit of a thrill seeing a recognizable vacation tourist spot that you have been to appear on screen in a major motion picture. For those who have the means to travel a lot, this might seem trivial, but for the average person who rarely gets to take an elaborate vacation, this is fun to see. That was my initial reaction to the opening shot of Alexander Payne’s The Descendants: a shot of a woman in a swimsuit riding on the rough ocean waves in a speedboat while the backdrop of Waikiki Beach, the skyscrapers on the sand, and Diamondhead decorate the background. We don’t see what happens next, but the aftermath of it is one of the key driving points of the film’s narrative.
This brief scene is followed by an explanation by Matt King (George Clooney) that anyone thinking of moving to Hawaii needs to hear. We have all heard about Hawaii being a paradise, and those of us lucky enough to have visited there know it is beautiful and tranquil…for a vacation. Living there full time is not the same thing, though. He mentions that he hasn’t surfed in fifteen years and that life is not a vacation just because he lives on a tropical island. People are screwed up everywhere, even in Hawaii, and life isn’t necessarily better just because of where you live.
Matt is self-professed to be stingy with the large inheritance he got from being a direct descendant of Hawaiian royalty. This comes in the form of both a monetary inheritance and being the sole trustee of a trust of 25,000 acres of pristine land on Kauai owned by his extended family. The land, of course, has a large monetary value, but is also a family legacy. Unlike Matt, who has ably managed his own finances, most of the rest of his extended family have burned through their inheritances and are pressuring Matt to sell the family land to developers for enough money to keep them all rich for a very long time. The selling of the land will mean more hardship for the locals though and an end to the family legacy. As the sole trustee, the sale is entirely up to Matt, who is planning on signing the land away within the week.
Matt’s wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), has just been in a serious boating accident and is comatose. Her doctors have informed Matt that she is essentially brain-dead and that, per her will, she is to be taken off of life support soon. Matt is advised to inform their families and make arrangements for everyone to get a chance to say their goodbyes before letting her pass on. Matt uses this situation to reconnect with his older daughter, Alex (Shailene Woodley), who is on another island in a private school. The two of them have had a rough relationship of late and Alex is rebellious and angry. He also needs her to help him with his younger daughter, Scottie (Amara Miller), who is showing signs of being a bully and rebellion on her own.
As he tries to mend these gaps in their relationships, Alex informs him that Matt’s wife, her mother, was having an affair and was planning on divorcing him in the near future. Devastated by this news and unsure how to deal with this latest revelation, Matt sets out, with the help of his daughters, to find the man she was having an affair with and confront a side of his wife that he didn’t even know existed. Things get more complicated, though, when they find the man and discover he is married and has a family of his own, too.
Opening the film on that shot of Elizabeth joyfully riding the speedboat off the shores of Waikiki paints a picture of what we all assume Hawaii is like. The skyscrapers behind her betray the fact that Oahu is a metropolis, the biggest city in the Hawaiian Islands, and thus not at all the tropical paradise we all picture Hawaii to be. This moment, capturing the beauty of the islands, also hides the tragedy that is just moments away. We never see it, but we understand it in the aftermath. This imagery of Elizabeth on the speedboat is juxtaposed with the imagery of what real life in Honolulu is like, the kind of imagery the tourism board wouldn’t want you to think about. This is the doldrums of working as a banker or lawyer, in office buildings in front of a computer all day. The view out the window might be nicer than some place like Dallas or New York City, but the life is basically the same.
And people are the same, too. There are alcoholics, drug abusers, infidelity, depressed people, and violence in paradise just like there is anywhere else. Matt informs us of that in the opening monologue, just in case you assumed Hawaii was nothing but palm trees and sand. Alexander Payne is making sure that, though he has set his film on this tropical island, we understand that we are going to be seeing people with relatable problems and that they are not exactly to be envied. This is important to ground this film and to emphasize the theme that there is darkness underneath the beauty.
This film is also tackling the very tricky subject of forgiveness. Elizabeth has done a very selfish thing; not only cheating on her husband but threatening to break up another man’s marriage in the process. For his part, this man, real estate agent Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard), didn’t love her and had no intention of leaving his wife and kids for her. This makes his part in the affair all the worse. Elizabeth is brain-dead and on life support, unable to defend her actions or even explain them. All we get is from those around her that knew about it.
The knowledge of the affair is a key reason her relationship crumbled with her older daughter, Alex. Alex saw her with Brian and later confronted her over it, causing a rift. But Alex also was struggling with how distant her father is, buried in work and little time for his family. She also knew that her mother wanted to live a more elaborate lifestyle than Matt was willing to offer, choosing to save his money rather than burn through it like the rest of his extended family had. The portrait we get of Elizabeth is not a flattering one, and without her around to defend herself, it is all we have of her character.
We get the sense that Matt had given up on his family, just as he had given up on the land of his inheritance. His father-in-law, played by the ever-reliable Robert Forester, blames him for his daughter’s condition because he believed Matt pushed her away, leading her to be in that boat at the time of the accident. The daughters feel neglected, too, one shipped off to another island to attend private school and the other left to get in trouble at her own school. Neither girl wants him to sell the land, and neither does Matt, but he is struggling with the responsibility and the pressure being heaped on his shoulders by his extended family, most notably Hugh (Beau Bridges), who is reluctant, but not unwilling, to be the bad guy in the situation if Matt doesn’t sell.
Finding out the identity of the man their mother was cheating with helps bring together the two girls and their father. It also gives Matt a purpose again, and when he does finally confront Brian, he does so without directly exposing the affair to Brian’s wife. But a combination of the tension between Brian and Matt and the decision Matt finally makes about the land, a deal Brian was heavily involved in, exposes the truth to Brian’s wife. While Brian refuses to say his own goodbyes to Elizabeth in the hospital, his wife does show up. She (Judy Greer) has some choice words to say, though she expresses her own kind of forgiveness for Elizabeth’s actions. Confronting her, even if she cannot defend her actions, is its own kind of catharsis.
Alexander Payne paints a wonderful tapestry of people and places that gives you a real sense of things. So often, lesser writers fail to truly bring people and places alive like this, and we feel like we are watching a scripted drama. But Payne is better than that, and we see him excelling at it again and again, one of the reasons he is so often recognized at the Academy Awards. This doesn’t feel artificial. This feels raw with emotion, with nuance, and with the jagged edge of real people going through the landmines of their relationships. It’s tough sometimes to navigate that, especially when lies get exposed and pain is uncovered. This is a reality that happens all over the world, even in paradise.
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Picture: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, and Jim Taylor
Best Director: Alexander Payne
Best Actor: George Clooney
Best Adapted Screenplay: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash (won)
Best Film Editing: Kevin Tent
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Release Date: November 18, 2011
Running Time: 115 minutes
Rated R
Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Beau Bridges, and Judy Greer
Directed by: Alexander Payne
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