February 8^th, 2012

Review: 8/10 Can of Whoop Ass

The Descendants

Part of the job of a movie star is not only to assume an identity when acting, but to distance him or herself from a public persona. For people like Brad Pitt and George Clooney, infamous for their “cool guy” personalities, it’s hard to separate their acting from the collectively held perception of their real lives. It’s much easier to suspend disbelief for reclusive stars, like Johnny Depp or Leonardo Decaprio, who aren’t obsessed with charity (Clooney) or adopting kids (Pitt by way of Jolie). The red-hot spotlight on Clooney’s real life has led to difficulty finding Oscar success (just one win for Best Supporting Actor in Syriana), because it hurts him coming and going. Clooney has had a hard time creating a signature performance because no character seems to live up to the real George Clooney, with his good looks and endless humanitarianism. In addition, directors and producers with serious roles (with sure-fire Oscar implications) don’t want Clooney’s celebrity clouding up their film. In result, Clooney has extended himself towards several lower budget, less-heralded projects, like The Descendants, in a legitimate effort towards artistic expression. Usually, it’s smart to be wary of these “pet projects” that big time stars go out of their way to make – as they can reek of self-serving egotism. But with The Descendants, Clooney has attached himself to something more. His stardom fades quickly into the quality of the film, like so many surfers swallowed by a pulsing Hawaiian tide.

The plot of the movie moves very quickly and doesn’t hold any punches. We are immediately given the bare bones of Matt King’s (Clooney) situation: his wife is comatose from a speed boat accident and he is just about to sell away his family’s inherited land, which they’ve owned for 150 years. While the two issues seem disconnected, they exist as a very real and dramatic tag-team come to destroy Matt’s fragile life. In addition, he has to deal with his rebellious daughters, Alexandra (played with moxy by Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (played with touching aloofness by Amara Miller), but things continue to get worse for poor Matt. First he learns that his wife is beyond saving and the doctors must soon take her off life support, in accordance with her own wishes. Almost simultaneously, through his estranged daughter, Matt learns that his wife had been having an affair before the accident.

The fact that Matt lives in Hawaii seems like a cruel joke. Playing off the cliché that “Hawaii is paradise”, Matt says that paradise, “can go fuck itself.” Like most people in real life, Matt only reflects on his station in times of distress, failing to recognize the signposts that led him there. And fittingly, the backdrop Matt King lives within shapes to his perception of it. Feeling the world collapsing around him, Hawaii doesn’t look like a paradise at all. Director Alexander Payne shows a side of the island you won’t find in a brochure. The skies are cloudy and ominous and moody. Houses and commercial districts and even traffic jams litter the cities. It always seems like it’s about to rain. And this visualization of Hawaii is reflective of the complexity of Matt’s feelings. He feels shame at the husband he never was, anger at his wife’s infidelity, envy at the man she loved instead, embarrassment that he is an incapable father, and sad at all the sorry things that have invaded his life. In a sordid state of mind like that, it’s no wonder it always seems like it’s about to rain.

Matt decides to take his daughters to a different part of Hawaii to confront the man who had been sleeping with his wife (who turns out to be what’s left of Matt Lillard’s mangled face). Along the way, he visits his family’s track of land – the one they will soon be selling away for hundreds of millions of dollars, thereby making his entire extended family rich. Staring down from a lush, grassy overlook, Matt and his family behold the land their family has preserved for over a hundred years. It’s the most beautiful visual of the entire film – the paradise everyone knows Hawaii to be. And this image becomes the central metaphor of the film, as it understands emotion as a reflection of perception.

It makes sense that Hawaii is “ugly” in the earlier stages of the movie because that is the ugly world Matt King believes it to be. Matt’s family is almost jaded with the beauty of Hawaii, as there is no crueler thought than having to live in paradise without the ones you love – and Elizabeth King (mother, wife, friend) is about to die. How can life, or beauty, go on after death? But the film is titled The Descendants because there are always things that continue on. The track of land the family owns is proof of this. There is no life and no beauty; there are only our ideas of it. Hawaii can seem ugly when we are depressed or picturesque when we are happy. A person on life support can seem on the brink of returning to life or fading into death. But there is strength in the recognition that we create these descriptions. And that is the most powerful lesson the film offers: that static objects do not inform our feelings – they mirror them.

The family’s track of land is beautiful because it appears to them as something pure and untouched by the corruption of modernity. Similarly, the pathetic state of Elizabeth King’s body on life support is a morbid farce of the woman she once was. But neither is any truer than the other. Life is funneled through mood and temperament and judged through emotion. Death and life exist as something unfathomable to our means of understanding – so we compensate with broad strokes of feeling. But in the end, Hawaii and Elizabeth King are the same: lifeless objects devoid of meaning. Our emotions evolve around these static reference points, not because of them.

Matt King goes through all the necessary stages of dealing with death: denial and anger and making amends and eventually acceptance. But what he learns from the process was that he was capable of dealing with everything right from the start; he just had to believe that he was. From there, he can say goodbye to his wife, secure his family’s land, and go on as a good father, because he has accepted life as controlled by his perception of it. He is happy again the second he decides to be.

Matt’s last name is a reference to his royal Hawaiian ancestry, but also a nod to life’s ability to pass things along - just like royal succession. Sadness, happiness, regret, death – it doesn’t matter. The things we choose are the things we preserve. The things we accept are the things we send to others. Matt can consume himself with things he cannot change or he can look forward, to his daughters and the world that will go on, and find contentment with what he will pass to his own descendants.