The Descendants

Alexander Payne (along with Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Haynes) is one of the few American filmmakers still able to make sophisticated, distinctive, independent-minded films. Payne harks back to a more intelligent, artistically rigorous Hollywood, the New Hollywood of Five Easy Pieces and The Last Picture Show. He is the F. Scott Fitzgerald of middle-aged stasis in middle-class Americana, a classy, wise, endlessly sympathetic chronicler of modern agonies. His breakthrough film, Election (1999), is a stylish, searingly funny school-as-politics allegory, with all sorts of symbolic currents of male sexual longing. About Schmidt (2002) is a patient, melancholy deconstruction of old age, led by an intriguingly reserved Jack Nicholson. Sideways (2004) is a sparkling wine of a film, an existential meander amongst the vineyards of friendship, marriage, casual sex and the tensions between the three. Payne’s short ‘14e arrondissement’, the final vignette in the variable anthology film Paris, je t’aime (2006), is possibly his most impressive achievement so far, a genuinely beautiful seven-minute hymn to happiness, narrated in halting French by an American postwoman on her first European holiday. Please watch it immediately if you haven’t already (here on YouTube).

The Descendants, then, is Payne’s first feature film in seven years, and it is ever so slightly disappointing. George Clooney plays Matt King, an affable Hawaii-based lawyer whose wife is sent into a coma after a speedboat accident. Matt is then burdened with family responsibility from all sides: he must look after his two livewire daughters (aged seventeen and ten) and deliver the news about his wife to all and sundry, but he must also oversee the potential sale of his ancestors’ vast plot of land, acting as sole trustee amongst his various cousins. The waters are muddied when Matt finds out his wife had been having an affair, so Matt and his daughters embark on a Broken Flowers-style hunt to find the culprit, bumping into friends and family along the way.

George Clooney is excellent, as ever, in what might be his saddest, most nuanced role so far, even lonelier than his one in Up In The Air. The secondary performances are universally strong, particularly Clooney’s two daughters and Beau Bridges as a hippy relative, and Payne’s characterisation is always admirably complicated. But there’s something rather staid and detached about the whole film. It is characteristically subtle, funny and dark, but it never seems to get going and certainly never reaches the heights of Payne's previous work. The philosophy of family and one’s place in history could also be explored more acutely than with photos of great-great-grandparents and hugs with cousins.

The Descendants is comfortably better than most American comedy dramas, very comfortably, and Alexander Payne remains one of the sharpest, most respectable figures in American cinema. However, the presence of Robert Forster, so good in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, made me wonder if this is Alexander Payne’s Jackie Brown, an intelligent, familiar, slightly restrained follow-up to an acknowledged masterpiece. Payne was always going to struggle to follow Sideways (for whose screenplay he won an Oscar, as Tarantino did for Pulp Fiction), but he’s had seven years since then and I worry that, in this instance, he’s mellowed at the expense of his socio-satirical bite. The short from Paris, je t’aime shows that Payne has not only still got it, but can scale even greater heights than Sideways. Ultimately, this film is rather like its central character: rational, very likeable, bold in places, funny in a sad sort of way, but ultimately both hold too much back, trapped between the past and the future, and are capable of so much more.