The Descendants

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Movie Details

• Genre: Drama
• Release Date: 2011-12-09 Limited
• Running Time: 115 min.
• Director: Alexander Payne
• Cast: George Clooney, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley, Mary Birdsong, Nick Krause, Amara
• Producer: Jim Burke, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor
• Writer: Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, Jim Rash
• Distributor: Fox Searchlight Pictures
• Official Site: The Descendants Official Site

Because it’s a total star turn for George Clooney, and because it's been seven years since director Alexander Payne's Sideways, and because it's an Oscar-button-pusher that endorses family and land preservation, The Descendants may be knocked by some critics for being too “easy” and eager-to-please. Please. This is precisely the sort of smart, affecting seriocomedy that Hollywood has forgotten how to make these days. It's a generous study in everyday catastrophes—death, infidelity, fractured families—that artfully acknowledges the obvious without wallowing in it. His wife in a coma (and about to be unplugged), attorney Matt King (Clooney) first cries in a long shot that Payne discreetly frames from behind. We can't see his tears, but we can understand his grief. King's two daughters, ages 10 and 17, are meanwhile acting out and talking trash; and his entire extended clan, which dates to colonial Hawaii, is greedily anticipating a huge windfall from the sale of ancestral property—paradise, about to be lost. This duly diligent lawyer prepares for the family vote to sell, until a prick not of conscience but of jealousy: Standing to profit from the deal is his wife's lover, a petty real-estate broker. King wants to confront the guy, so he drags his daughters on an island-hopping road trip—searching for one thing, finding another. Though King may compare his family to “an archipelago, always slowly drifting apart,” we still call those islands a chain.