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DIRECTOR Alexander Payne CAST George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause Clooney gives a beautifully understated performance as Matt King, a lawyer in Hawaii, who must settle awkward family scores when his wife is critically injured in a boating accident. The interplay between a once-distant dad and his two sassy daughters is warmly conveyed. Exquisitely sad and irresistibly funny all at once. AUDIO DESCRIPTION AVAILABLE - Please contact the cinema in advance This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it Alexander Payne (Sideways) new Oscar-nominated film, set in Hawaii, is a sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic journey for Matt King (George Clooney). He is an indifferent husband and father of two girls, who is forced to re-examine his past and embrace his future when his wife suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki. The event leads to a rapprochement with his young daughters while Matt wrestles with a decision to sell the family's land handed down from Hawaiian royalty and missionaries. BBFC advice: Contains strong language “Nothing gives me more pleasure than to welcome a new film by the gifted writer-director Alexander Payne, especially as The Descendants, his first movie since Sideways eight years ago, is so good, and in so many ways... Matt is a workaholic lawyer, so dedicated to his legal practice that he's neglected his wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), a flirtatious beauty obsessed with speed sports on land and water, and their daughters, the 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), a heavy-drinking, drug-abusing semi-delinquent, and the rebellious, intellectually precocious, foul-mouthed Scottie (Amara Miller). Troubles descend on Payne's characters the way sorrows come to Claudius in Hamlet – "not single spies, but in battalions" – and Matt gets a Job-lot of them. Enough, in fact, to make him reconsider his life at its Dantesque midway as husband, father, conscience-keeper to his larger family, and as a citizen. His wife has a speedboat accident that leaves her in a coma, and her living will compels him to have her support system switched off and to assume responsibility for his children. Meanwhile, as trustee for the family's property, he is negotiating the sale of a vast tract of virgin land that will make them all multimillionaires. It might also put vast areas in the hands of despoilers and betray a 150-year-old legacy. Were this not enough, he discovers that Elizabeth has been conducting an affair with a stranger. This is the stuff of melodrama, tragedy, soap opera. But Kaui Hart Hemmings in her novel, and Payne and his collaborators, do not treat it like this. Within a single scene the film can tap into deep feelings of pain, switch into comic modes as various as farce and satire, and confront and evade moral challenges. Within a couple of seconds a father can tell a daughter her mother is dying, she can respond by revealing the mother was engaged in adultery, and both can shock us and make us laugh. When Matt sets out on his angry revenge trip, he constantly loses his dignity and is distracted from his mission by those accompanying him and the people he meets. The Descendants becomes a kind of exhilarating, island-hopping road movie with Matt as much in search of himself as of his wife's mysterious lover. Along the way he's learning what it means to be a man, to understand himself and others. In becoming a responsible person he must make decisions about both the nature of honesty and the difficulty of recognising when your motives are mixed and when properly disinterested. Payne knows the difference between lightness and frivolity, between seriousness and solemnity, between different kinds of cloud. Even minor characters who appear only briefly – such as Matt's stern, judgmental father-in-law (Robert Forster) and his boozy, sybaritic cousin (Beau Bridges) – are given moral depth and ambiguity. The daughters act and interact well, coming to terms with themselves, their father and mother with angry or amused understanding and without a trace of bland sentimentality. Clooney has the same problem Clark Gable and Cary Grant had – he can't appear ordinary, humble or defenceless. But he can show a man trying to find his emotional and ethical bearings, a man capable of being hurt and questioning himself. In The Descendants he gives his best performance to date.” read more UK RELEASE 27 January 2012 RUNNING TIME 115 minutes COUNTRY USA |
