The Descendants Review: The Morals Of A King

The miracle of The Descendants, the new Hawaii-based Alexander Payne film starring George Clooney, is that it holds itself together while dashing through the twists and turns of its plot. There is a comatose, dying wife and her mourning husband—two daughters struggling with separate problems of growing older—the realization that the dying wife had been unfaithful with a local realtor—a father who is kept (and keeps himself) from confronting the wildness of his favorite child. And that’s not even covering most of it. Payne and his ace cast handle all of these developments with great care and subtlety, appearing effortless in the execution.

But the overarching plot issue is the one that Payne et al handle best. For those entirely unfamiliar with the film, the film focuses on Matt King (Clooney), who must deal not only with his dying wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) and his troublesome daughters, but also with his role as the trustee of a 25,000-acre spread of land on the Hawaiian island of Kaua’i. King and his family are the descendants of missionaries and native royalty, which pedigree entrusted them the land and the trust expires in seven years’ time. King and most of the extended family wants to sell the land to a developer, which will bring in millions of dollars into the family. There are a few relatives who oppose the sale, but Payne’s film doesn’t give them much screen time.

I cite this plot element as overarching because it winds in and out of the film, appearing largely at the beginning and the end. King’s dying wife and his deteriorating personal life quickly take center stage once he learns that his wife had been cheating on him prior to her fatal boating accident. King and his elder daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) take on the task of investigating and finally confronting Elizabeth’s hapless lover. As separate as the issues of land and King’s wife may have been up to that point, the melodramatic fates cast them into allegiance with one another; King learns that the realtor his wife had been seeing is the same man who would end up receiving the commissions on the 25,000 acres, should it be sold to this developer.

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With regard to the land, King makes the decision the audience already knew he would make: the land stays in the hands of the family. We have to thank that expectation the brief conversation between King and his two daughters in the middle of the film as they survey the entrusted land. After Alexandra mentions how she used to go camping with her mother on the entrusted land, Scottie (Amara Miller) disdainfully points out that, young as she is, she hasn’t had the chance (and implicitly will never have the chance) to camp on the land as Alexandra did. As dominated by the notion of inter-generational conflict as the environmental movement is today (let’s not ruin this planet for our children! [and our children’s children!]), I think anyone could have predicted the ultimate outcome.

The moral complexity of the film arises from how King makes his decision after having learning about the involvement of his late wife’s lover in the development deal. While I ultimately come down on the side of King’s decision regarding land (the development of land for recreational/resort uses is not the same case as mining the same pristine landscape for a necessary mineral such as copper; see John McPhee’s excellent and excellently objective book Encounters with the Archdruid for more on these matters) I cannot help but feel a distaste for his final decision. Amidst the triumphant environmentalist feeling in the wake of that scene, there is a lingering dissonance. Is something still right even if done for the wrong reasons? Would King have arrived at the same decision without the knowledge of that particular realtor’s involvement in the plans?

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I must conclude by offering that the film, while quite impressive, had one glaring flaw, which was King’s overbearing voiceover narration that opens the film. The narration serves as an effective, if entirely clumsy, method of grounding the audience with plot details. This, I think, is in contrast to the rest of the film, which tackles scenes with an earnest energy and expects the audience to follow along. As much as I don’t like screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s dictum that voiceovers should never be used—famously parodied in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation—I think it applies to this film. The voiceover in The Descendants is a writer being lazy; I expect better work from the screenwriting team of Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash, who did such a bang-up job on the rest of the film.

Also, perhaps some of you think that I have “spoiled” the film by letting you in on the ending. That, I think, would be a grievous underestimation of this film. As much as I have made of the plot, that is not where the film derives its power. The power is in the close writing of the scenes and the earthy, believable characters brought to life in a series of awkward, unfortunate moments. But those moments lead somewhere wonderful: the final scene provides the most heartwarming episode of domestic harmony I’ve seen in quite some time. Look forward to it.