Currer reviews The Descendants, an egregious movie that the critics and awards-people are loving
Natalie Golding is The Currer Ball
Generally speaking, I’m easily pleased – probably too easily pleased – by any film that comes along. I enjoyed the muted melancholy of Another Earth, marvelled at the too-good-to-be-true heroics of Captain America, and will even happily smirk my way through SyFy’s wilfully dreckish hybrid monster movies on a Sunday afternoon. In fact, the only truly abysmal film I saw in 2011 snuck in right at the end: the abomination that was New Year’s Eve; but at least I was expecting that.
However, every so often, along comes a film that, beyond all reason and rationale, I hate. The Descendants is one such film.
In the director’s chair, Alexander Payne, the bloke behind Sideways and About Schmidt, both also acclaimed by the critical class. Here, Payne posits that the trappings of a good life don’t necessarily make for a good life. George Clooney plays Matt King, a titular descendant of Hawaiian royalty, who discovers his wife’s infidelity only after a boating accident puts her in a coma. On such a flimsy premise is built the only film capable of taking down The Artist bandwagon on Oscar night.
And indeed, there’s plenty to admire. Clooney’s brilliantly schlubby, shaking off his natural star quality to inhabit the distinctly uncharismatic skin of the cuckolded King. Likewise, Shailene Woodley excels as his eldest daughter Alexandra, both unbelievably self-possessed and believably brattish. The surprise diamond in the rough’s Nick Krause, who confuses and amuses as Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend, and whose deceptive idiocy provides a bit warmth in what’s otherwise an emotionally cool film. There’s plenty of bleak humour and surprising tenderness throughout. And it goes without saying that Hawaii’s islands, whether they’re sun-saturated or shrouded in early morning mist, look gorgeous.
So, what’s not to like?
Well, it’s a typical Alex Payne production: a painfully generic plot packed with characters that are more irritating than interesting, and wholly dependent on its fine cast. Certain films (anything starring Jason Statham or directed by Michael Bay, for example) are routinely derided by the media intelligentsia as lazy, empty, lowest common denominator film-making (despite the fact that millions of people actually enjoy them). So it’s ironic that The Descendants is a sort of middle-class equivalent for those very people, i.e. film-making by numbers for materially comfortable intellectual snobs who want licence to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got issues too.’
Even worse, the film’s emotional content’s intellectualised out of all recognition. Just as economists define human beings as flawed ‘rational actor’, writer-director Payne churns out a range of characters with little or no depth, whose perplexing reactions to various traumas are merely fodder for the pedestrian plot and arch screenplay.
Discovering that your spouse was cheating on you after an accident put her in a coma would be devastating. But there’s no doubt that discovering this when your only other problems are which half a billion dollar bid to accept for your land, berating the lax pastoral care at your daughter’s $35,000 a year school, and trying to remember which day the pool guy comes, might justifiably be labelled ‘rich people problems’ by the… 99%. That the film tries to hammer home its thesis by depicting members of Hawaii’s indigenous Polynesian population in various states of implied distress is either incomprehensibly ironic, or breathtakingly ignorant; either way, it’s certainly insulting.
The Descendants is riddled with good performances and were it a more low-key entry, I’d no doubt have quietly enjoyed it before quickly forgetting all about it. Instead, it’s blown into town as an establishment favourite, eliciting more fawning than a CEO at a company picnic. It’s just as well that it was tailor-made for the 1% as they’re the only ones who could possibly stomach sitting through 2 hours of such a gratuitously navel-gazing, emotionally incoherent drag of a film.
