Words: James Soo

or all its flaws, the Descendants is a nuanced portrayal of a family that is coming apart. George Clooney plays Matt King, the staid attorney and trustee of a large piece of land in Hawaii that is due to be sold for a great deal of money to developers. At the start of the film, his wife suffers a horrific accident while waterskiing and you next see her in hospital, in a coma, with a grieving Clooney by her side. Their two daughters are next introduced: the younger daughter is at an age where reality and fantasy merge easily, the older is in her late teens, and is already jaded and bitter. King thinks his job is to manage his two daughters and the sale of the land. But it all changes when he discovers that the origin of his elder daughter’s anger is that his comatose wife was in fact having an affair and was planning to leave him.

Director Alexander Payne does a good job of inculcating a Wes Andersen quirkiness, with King’s bizarre family and the cruel drama of grieving for someone who doesn’t love you. But the film suffers from a bit too much cool. King and his daughters don’t ever strike you as people whose wife and mother is dying – while King has to maintain an aura of decorum, the resulting lack of emotion is too stylized to allow the audience to sympathise.

That is not to say the film doesn’t have some fine performances: Clooney does well as the much put-upon King, and Shailene Woodley in particular shines as the fractious elder daughter. The screenplay is wry and witty and the entire film feels modishly low-key. But it is perhaps this desire to be modish that stops the film from really tackling its subject matter and making the leap from an exercise in style to something more emotionally affecting.