Crisis in Hawaii

The Descendants is a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family — is there any other kind of family? I’ve yet to meet one — made by Alexander Payne, who also made About Schmidt and Sideways, but whereas I warmed to those films, I could not warm to this. I liked it. I enjoyed it. I did not resent the time I’d spent watching it, although that may just be because I seriously have nothing better to do. (I spent much of this morning removing the fluff from my keyboard with a pin, for example.)

It’s already been heaped with praise and two Oscar nominations (for best picture and George Clooney’s performance) but it left me cold. I suppose at some level I just could not buy it or its basic premise that someone married to Clooney might have an affair. I probably wouldn’t. I don’t know what makes me think this, I just do. I would even put down my pin the moment he got home and would have made something nice for our tea, like a lasagne.

Directed and co-written by Payne, who adapted it from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, this, too, is about a man in crisis and our man is Matt King (Clooney). Matt is a Hawaiian real estate magnate whose family, which has been on the island for centuries, must soon dispose of a huge plot of pristine land. Hawaii looks ravishingly dazzling in this, absolutely paradisial, but, as Matt says in his opening narration, people suffer the same losses, tragedies and bereavements here as anywhere. (‘Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself,’ is how he puts it.)

The land isn’t Matt’s only problem as there is also the small matter of his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), who was involved in a speedboat accident and is now in a coma from which, the doctors tell him, she will never emerge.