12-15-11 Movie Review: The Descendants

The Descendants is an astonishingly honest and realistic and unsentimental movie, especially for an American movie, about how a family faces death and confrontations, for the first time, with each other.

George Clooney is the father and the daughters are ten-year-old Amara Miller and seventeen-year-old Shailene Woodley, all three performing brilliantly; Clooney is worth Oscar nomination and Woodley should become a star. Writer-Director Alexander Payne and co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash should be Oscar contenders, too, as should The Descendants itself. It’s maybe too sad and unsensational to be a superhit, but it’s right up there with Emelio Estevez’s The Way as grownup movie fare of a type I hesitate to call mere entertainment.


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The other support characters, especially the boyfriend and the grandfather, tend to start out a little unsympathetic but grow on you as you get to know them; this is a world of ordinary people doing the best they can, not villains; though they are far from perfect, a little more willingness to face each other honestly would help a lot, and eventually most of them try it. The Descendants is not sloppy Christmas stuff, but the director of Sideways and Reese Witherspoon in Election shows a faith in humanity that goes well with the season, along with a clear-eyed realism that will not make a saint of even a mother who is in a coma.

There are almost no tears in a situation that would justify a lot of them, and no miraculous happy endings; but Descendants left me thinking, “Yeah, that’s the way life is; and it ain’t so bad after all.”