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There’s nothing funny about grief, but there is a lot to laugh about in the grievous business of life. In that tiny crack in the order of things — a loophole, if you will, in the human contract — director Alexander Payne has found sustenance and inspiration. In The Descendants, for instance, his new tragicomedy, here comes George Clooney, running down the street in his flip-flops and Hawaiian shirt on a slap-happy mission of pathos. His wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) has just had a boating accident and lies in a coma. Now he has learned that she had been cheating on him. He is running to a neighbour’s house to see if they knew about this — everyone seems to have been in on it — and who the other man was.
Clooney, playing a successful lawyer named Matt King, doesn’t look much like the confident ironist of his more successful romantic comedies or slick adventures. He looks like a well-preserved older guy running in flip-flops, winded, desperate, lost. He also looks, well, a little funny.
The accident and the affair are just the beginning of The Descendants, a casually unbuttoned story that asks you to laugh and mourn with a strange crew of people in an exotic and indefinable location. Not much happens until everything does, and as it did in Payne’s most successful films — Sideways, About Schmidt, Election — it happens to outsiders, men who haven’t quite grown up and must be taught to live through crisis.
It’s jammed with characters and meanders irresistibly across Hawaii, presented here not as an island paradise, but more a workaday beach community of bad dressers. “Paradise? Paradise can go f--- itself” Matt says in voice-over. Payne, adapting a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, has discovered a secret of grief: There’s a giddiness to (grief), a sort of freedom enclosed in its small shell of day-to-day getting through things. It’s like an island, cut off from hope but liberating. It carries on.
With his faithless wife in a coma — Elizabeth lies silently at the centre of the story — Matt must become a parent to two daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller), whom he hasn’t had much time for. “I’m the backup parent, the understudy,” he says, and he has his work cut out for him. Alexandra, the older girl, is especially angry; she knows about her mother and won’t forgive her. Woodley — star of the ABC Family channel show, The Secret Life of the American Teenager — gives a fiercely authentic performance. (For all his troubles, Matt is blessed with a dynamite supporting cast, including Robert Forster as Elizabeth’s perpetually angry father.)
There’s another story going on in The Descendants as well. Matt controls a family trust that owns 25,000 valuable acres on Kauai, and it’s up to him whether it’s preserved or sold to developers. Matt is descended from Hawaiian royalty, although they have devolved into a group of layabouts and fortune-hunters. Notable among them is Beau Bridges, who was born to wear a Hawaiian shirt, (he and brother Jeff Bridges’ Dude would make an ideal salt and pepper set at some Honolulu gift shop.)
Matt and his girls must help one another through this family crisis, with the unlikely help of Alexandra’s boyfriend Sid (Nick Krause). Sid is a hilarious stoner who’s smarter than he looks, although that’s true of much of The Descendants.
The movie takes its time going to a fairly predictable conclusion, but that’s because it keeps turning into glorious little cul de sacs. For example: Matt will meet his wife’s genial lover (Matthew Lillard, an anti-Clooney) and his wife (Judy Greer), whose awkward position — a woman whose rival is in a coma — allows her a memorable scene of sad compassion.
Clooney has never been better in a role that asks us to ignore his improbably good looks and see, instead, a baffled and unhinged tragedy in a Hawaiian shirt. Movie ads are always telling us that we’ll laugh and we’ll cry. In The Descendants, you really will.
"Vancouver The Sun"
