I fear that my recent cycle of poverty is hurting my ability to empathize with the problems of the super rich. And this is something that is brought up right away in director Alexander Payne's new movie "The Descendants." The main character, a man named Matt King, confides to us in voiceover that people think his life is paradise simply because he lives in Hawaii. But he says that he has the same screwed up family problems as anybody else and they hurt all the same. True, this is true, I guess. Matt King's wife has just been in a boating accident and now lies in a coma in the hospital. The doctor tells him that she is not going to make it. His daughters aren't taking it very well. His father-in-law blames him. He finds out that she was having an affair. Screwed up stuff. But Matt King, unlike regular people, is also the descendant of Hawaiian royalty and is the sole trustee of a some of the last pristine area of Hawaiian real estate. When it is sold, it will be sold for many millions. He has a successful law practice and has the ability to send his daughters to private schools. He looks like George Clooney. So the whole wife thing, that sucks, it does. But I figure this guy will do just fine.
There's a fine amount of drama here floating about in vague meandering directions. It turns out that the wife has not been the best of people. So we have several scenes here where people get mad at a lifeless body. In one example, Matt King storms about the hospital room saying rather hurtful things at her. It is a frustrating thing to watch of course because the main impetus for the scene can't respond or defend herself in any way. So we don't really get both sides and don't really know what is going on. It is obvious that it is important though because people are wailing and yelling. But without explanations this feels more weird than dramatic. Perhaps flashbacks would have helped. A good deal of the rest of the movie involves Matt King telling family and friends that his wife will not wake up. It may seem cold of me to say that there were too many of these scenes, but I don't know anything about this person. There is no connection here. Things need to be explained a little bit more. (I have seen a movie which had a scene that worked involving a guy getting mad at his dead wife who had been cheating on him. That was Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris," and it was one of the best and saddest scenes I have ever seen. The parallels in these two scenes make George Clooney's outburst pale in comparison. Watch both of them and compare the acting styles. I prefer Brando's. It is more intimate. It starts off softer. It builds. There is a crescendo of anger with denouement of true sadness. It has a rhythm to it like great music. Clooney is dramatically correct but all over the place.)
The humor in the movie basically consists of Matt King's daughters acting out and him telling them to watch their mouths and not do weird things. Along for the ride is Sid (played by Nick Krause) who says dumb surfer things. I've seen Alexander Payne movies that were much funnier. Something like "Sideways" for instance much more brilliantly blended intelligent drama with true action and true hilarity. We have here a lot of dramatic grief but very little comic relief. Even Shakespeare knew to throw in some ribald jokes here and there. The movie has moments yes, and some rather good scenes where Matt and his daughters track down and confront the guy his wife was having an affair with, but overall the movie lacks that extra nerve or zest that makes a great movie. I will be disappointed if this gets a lot of Oscar Nominations and something like Bridesmaids blanks. A wife in a coma and people crying about it does not automatically a great movie make.
One more thing, the voiceover this movie employs. It is there for the first fifteen minutes of the movie and then it disappears for the last three fourths of it. Why? Is the narrator no longer speaking to us anymore? Have the rules of the storytelling changed a quarter of the way through the story? There are certain rules about voiceover that should be followed. For one, it should never be used to tell us what is going on. This is generally redundant and often lazy. Two, voiceovers should be consistent. Good examples of this are "Amadeus" which is voiceover via real time confession; "Forrest Gump" which is voiceover via real time storytelling. "Fight Club," which is voiceover via a brain thought process. A master of voiceover is Director Terrance Malick. See his movies "The Thin Red Line," "The New World," and "The Tree of Life." Voiceover there is used as poetry which floats over a scene in meditation. All of these examples have consistent voiceover. They are entwined into the very structure of the story. We know who is speaking and who they are speaking to if they are speaking to anybody. They don't simply cease happening or seem like they are switching from narration to private thoughts and back again. All of these rules are broken in "The Descendants," and then the voiceover disappears entirely. This is shoddy writing and again I hope it does not get nominated for Best Writing. There really is better stuff out there.
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