I had a really hard time composing this review to Alexander Payne’s long-awaited sixth feature and widely acclaimed dramedy, as I know that it will not be well-received.  I’m sure there will be a lot of people reading this who will take issue with much of what I write about The Descendants.  But believe me, I take no pleasure in calling this a dreadful failure on almost every level.

George Clooney stars as beleaguered land baron and attorney Matt King, who informs us through voiceover of all the problems he’s facing in his life after scolding anyone who thinks that wealthy Hawaiian inheritors live just a little easier than the rest of us.  It appears as though Mr. King is the sole trustee of about 35,000 acres of inherited virgin Kaua’i land, and has to decide whether or not to sell it off to real estate developers for a fortune.  More pressing is that his wife Elizabeth has suffered a serious head injury and has been in a coma from which he learns will never recover from.  His voiceover then goes on (and on) to bemoan the strained relationship his family has suffered in recent years, from his drifting apart from Elizabeth to difficulties with his daughters.  He is especially having a hard time with his tempestuous teenage daughter Alex, who in a fit of despair reveals that her mother had been unfaithful to Matt, prompting a search for the man who cuckolded him.

This narration dominates the storytelling of the film for the first ten minutes or so, packing in detail after detail of plot points and loaded analogies (“My family seems exactly like an archipelago…”).  Of course it’s in that characteristic detached, slightly bemused delivery that Clooney employs in every movie starring him that uses voiceover as a crutch in its introduction before being almost entirely dropped by the second act.  But our lead actor’s trademark mannerisms continue on through nearly the entire film even when they’re the wrong fit in several scenes.  Sure, he has impressive moments from time to time, but it’s a very inconsistent performance clearing milestones he passed years ago.  How critics and the Academy are struck with collective amnesia on his proven abilities whenever he pushes even slightly past Danny Ocean characterization is beyond me.

You'll see no gushing over Clooney's performance from this review.

Compounding that issue is Payne’s refusal to look at him with a critical eye for more than a passing line or two.  One of the director’s most recognizable auteurial identifiers is his mocking tone towards screwed-up people; be it the irresponsible knocked-up junkie Ruth Stoops or the vicious over-achiever Tracy Flick or (to a lesser extent) the self-pitying wino Miles, there’s a cruelly ironic tone he takes with those indelible characters that elicits sympathy regardless.  This is because his meanness was even-handed; he didn’t come down on any one character harder than those surrounding them, and there was a human tragedy he was able to spin from balancing sympathy with criticism.  Not so in The Descendants, where he appears to be so in love with Matt that he flattens nearly every other character around his hero and throws those who dare question his Uplifting Emotional Journey into a “boo/hiss” pile…usually within seconds of being introduced.  We keep hearing over and over how flawed and broken King is, but his mistakes as a father and husband are all described with meager nebulousness.  Meanwhile, the immorality of his onscreen actions – such as dragging his daughters along with him on his little manhunt and hurling verbal abuse at his comatose wife before admonishing Alex for doing the same thing – are barely confronted at all.  Meanwhile, we’re expected to cheer when he finally makes his almost comically predictable decision in regards to his undeveloped land.  Isn’t it nice to see a man of enormous wealth and privilege teaching us all (including some of his impoverished cousins) in the wake of one of the worst recessions of modern times that money isn’t everything?

Meanwhile, Payne is more than happy to pitilessly condemn other characters for lesser offenses, especially his female cast.  “What is it about the women in my life that makes them want to destroy themselves?” is one gallingly inappropriate rhetorical question King asks to us, as it has no business referring to two girls whose destructive, confused anger is nothing more than the perfectly understandable byproduct – however botched its actual depiction here – of dealing with sudden family hardship.  Everyone else is simply written as a crude caricature and smacked down for it, except for the occasional shoehorning of quick “redemptive” moments with believability verging on zero.

Ignoring its off-putting judgmental attitude for a moment, the film is just poorly made.  The script is a total mess in terms of structure: characters are over-emphasized then suddenly dropped and some plot points (like Sid’s entire presence) are borderline nonsensical.  Its pacing is way off, as trivial sequences are stretched far too long while more crucial ones are glibly rushed through.  DP Phedon Papamichael makes the wise choice of not shooting Hawaii like a cruise line ad, but his cinematography is so banal that it fails to visually communicate anything.  Perhaps his goal was to capture the workaday melancholy of an unseen side of paradise, but that’s hard to follow through on when your director has at best a passing interest in developing that idea.  But bottom of the barrel below-the-line spotlights must go to whoever decided to cram in some of the most god-awful dinky luau music in a supposedly tragic story.

Oh, the pain of dealing with a substantial inheritance!

A few of you might believe my rating of half a star is going too far or being willfully contrarian.  I assure you it’s not.  I thought long and hard about something, anything redeeming about The Descendants, and just about the only praiseworthy element that I could think of are a few of the supporting performances that try to go deeper than their risibly-written parts.  Shailene Woodley does her best when she’s not just standing around looking petulant in tiny swimsuits and, in the film’s pound-for-pound best performance, Judy Greer is touching as the betrayed wife of Brian before being sent off on a cruel joke at her expense.  See?  Even when the film starts to show hints of genuine feeling, Payne cuts it down for the sake of snide cheap shots.

The Descendants is not the worst movie of 2011.  However, it is definitely one of the more upsetting experiences that I’ve had in a theater all year, not just because of its pervasive and badly disguised misanthropy, or its insincere attempts at emotional insight, but also because three of my colleagues and friends – John H. Foote, Joey Magidson and Michael Ward – gave the film our site’s highest rating and declared it a masterpiece.  Now, I don’t resent disagreement by any means.  Simply put, the world is a better place when someone sees something valuable and uplifting in a film, no matter how abhorrent I may personally find it.  But it nevertheless depresses me that I cannot join hands in celebration of a movie that so genuinely touched them and must instead publicly rebuke the downright offensive thing I actually witnessed.

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