FILM: The Descendants

Directed by Alexander Payne. Starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Nick Krause, Amara Miller, Judy Greer, Beau Bridges, Robert Forster, Matthew Lillard, Mary Birdsong, Rob Huebel I went to Hawai’i for the first time in 1971.  I was 23, and it was a layover stop for me as a flight attendant working military charters to Vietnam.  I’ve been there many times since then - my most frequent destination.  I like to think I know it well.  I certainly love it well - here’s proof:  do you know ANYONE who listens to Hawai’ian music on Pandora besides me? 

So, a film about Hawai’i and its heritage, I’m gonna be there. And I loved the film. Warning: you may tear up at the end. I did.  But I cannot avoid the issues it raises for me.  The King character(George Clooney)  is deeply sympathetic, isn’t he?  He’s so handsome, so beleaguered.

Well, NOT, as one of the troubled children in the film might say.  He’s deeply withholding, and decides to keep the vast family landholding partly because he can’t bear to lose his beloved heritage and mostly as recompense for his wife’s betrayal - with a real estate agent, no accident here.  He’s an example of the amoral colonial land user that both King and Speer are.

What should he have done with the land?  Give it back to the state of Hawai’i for a public park that balances access with environmental stewardship.  Historically, the real estate history in Hawai’i is a sad chronicle of land-rape.  Anglo missionaries and enterprising businessmen acquired property from an indigenous people who were, for the most part, incapable of making a fully informed decision.

Read Sarah Vowell’s recent book, “Unfamiliar Fishes”, her reflective, arch observations on the history of American colonialism in Hawai’i.  The dispersed land of Hawai’i is mirrored by its population’s deeply blended ethnic heritage.  There’s no one to give the land back TO.  So, it must go back to everyone.

In the film, King comes to a tempered, generous view of his fatherhood and stewardship.  He has 7 years to come up with a solution, like Jacob at the well.  I’d like to think there will be a sequel where he does the right thing.

As for the film itself: wonderful acting, an elegant catharsis of plot, lovely cinematography, superior Hawai’ian music, great Reyn Spooner shirts, and a memorable last scene, promising the possibility of return, though we know we can’t swim in the same ocean twice.

“A tough, tender, observant, exquisitely nuanced portrait of mixed emotions at their most confounding and profound -- all at play within a deliciously damp, un-touristy Hawaii that's at once lush and lovely to look at.” - Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

“ It's a serious movie that happens to have a sense of humor, because Payne and his collaborators see the absurdity in everyday existence.” 

Leonard Maltin

” Both films (From Here to Eternity) are infused with the atmosphere of their Hawaiian setting, and its strange compound of chillout and treachery. Everyone remembers Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but stay with that scene and you soon find it foaming with accusation and shame. Something similar happens to “The Descendants,” with damp squalls and difficult mists nagging at the edge of people’s amicable warmth.

• Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

...”and despite a gesture or two toward Honolulu’s downside, Hawaii still feels like heaven on earth. - J. Hoberman

“Payne pursues this tactic throughout the film: caricaturing people before he tries to humanize them. But the characters don't ripen organically; they're first one thing, then another. ...in another love-and-death family epic playing here, the Franco-Canadian Canadian Café de Flore — a bolder narrative experiment than The Descendants, and a film that sustains its emotional equilibrium in a story about the one who loves and the one who leaves. -

Richad Corliss, Time Magazine