UPDATED: Nov. 30, 2011, 1:25 p.m.

When ‘The Descendants’ director Alexander Payne released his last film, ‘Sideways,’ in 2004, critics generally agreed that there was no better comedy director in the business. With ‘The Descendants,’ Payne stakes his claim as a leading maker of comedies and one of the finest directors working in American cinema today.

The most recent of Payne’s middle-aged, confused and cornered protagonists is Matt King (George Clooney), a lawyer in Hawaii whose wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), is in a coma following a gruesome boating accident. For the first time, King is burdened with caring for his two daughters, the uppity 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and the problematic 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), all by himself. His anxiety is aggravated further upon discovering his wife had been carrying on an affair with a conniving real estate agent.

 

Oh, and he’s also pressured by his greedy relatives to sell, for as much as half a billion dollars, 25,000 acres of pristine Hawaiian land procured by the King family’s great ancestors. He’s a smart man with many life-altering decisions on his plate and without a clue of how to handle any of it.

 

George Clooney stuns in a role that requires a pitch-perfect balance of comic sharpness and raw sadness, which he aces under Payne’s masterly guidance. There is scarcely a dilemma, or line of Clooney’s, that the audience can’t empathize with or invest in completely. Payne and Clooney earn viewers’ trust and loyalty from the beginning and never loosen their grip for a moment.

 ‘The Descendants’ is a film indebted to its setting. Payne embraces a relatively undressed and even bleak Hawaii that serves as the perfect backdrop for King’s crisis. Payne reveals the flipside of the warm and idyllic state and presents it as a neat suburban hell. King’s disposition is as damp, bleak and deceptive as his homeland. Payne achieves the near impossible: He makes us forget that we’re watching George Clooney.

His films are rarely complexly shot or groundbreaking. Payne just strives for emotional authenticity — and he excels. Images are often merely vehicles for moving the story forward, so Payne’s sensibilities often lean more toward theater than cinema. He understands how to meld hilarity and sadness, and the result of his chemistry is always exhilarating. It is hard to tell whether Clooney is sad or hopeful at any given moment — a delightful confusion. When Elizabeth’s father, for example, is informed of his daughter’s worsening condition, he takes out his anger by way of punching a pothead teenager in the face. In ‘The Descendants,’ the lighthearted and heavyhearted are inextricably linked in every line, expression and action.

 

Payne has made only five films, all of which he wrote and directed. The likes of Charlie Chaplin, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, James L. Brooks and Leo McCarey first come to mind as filmmakers adept at balancing comedy and drama. Though all were extraordinarily adept at filming both genres, none could do both simultaneously as consistently and powerfully as Payne. He manages to meld humor and heartbreak as few of his predecessors have and as none of his descendants likely ever will.

smlittma@syr.edu

Published on November 29, 2011 at 12:00 pm