The Descendants
starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Matthew Willard, Judy Greer, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges and Patricia Hastie
screenplay by Alexander Payne, Nat Faxton and Jim Rash
directed by Alexander Payne
Rating: ♦♦♦♦◊
Based on the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants tells the story of Honolulu real estate lawyer Matt King whose wife, Elizabeth, is dying in a comma after suffering a head injury while boating. Elizabeth will not recover. She will die, and Matt is struggling to deal with his troublesome teenaged daughters, his bothersome cousins, and the revelation that Elizabeth was having an affair. Plus he has to say good-bye to his wife and figure out a whole new perspective on life in the midst of all the other shit going on in his life.
"Paradise can go fuck itself."
One interesting note, I saw in the credits that the author of the book, Kaui Hart Hemmings, is actually in the film in a cameo appearance as Matt’s secretary. So out of curiosity I watched it again to see what she looked like. I knew the secretary was only in one scene for just a moment, so I knew roughly where to look. And there she was, for all of two seconds!
Hawaii has the reputation for being a kind of heaven. It’s interesting in this movie to see a lot more of ordinary Hawaii than
I usually see in movies or that I even think about. For me, Hawaii is a black-and-white backdrop for Japanese torpedo bombers diving on Pearl Harbor. Or, it’s just a line of hotels near the beach. But in The Descendants I get to see normal residential streets with normal houses. Sure, everybody is wearing those stupid, ugly Hawaiian shirts. But other than that they seem pretty normal. There seemed to be a lot of precipitation. I mean, the streets were always wet, like from a recent rainfall. That kind of took the steam out of my sunny, tropical image.