Written by Burhan Wazir, New Media, DFI

Now Playing in Doha!: The Descendants
Film: The Descendants
Director: Alexander Payne
Stars: George Clooney, Amara Miller, Shailene Woodley
Running time: 115 mins

There is little that tempts the viewer to book a Hawaiian holiday after watching “The Descendants”. In Alexander Payne’s first film since 2004’s Oscar winning “Sideways”, sun-kissed beaches, blue skies and carefree watersports make way for leaden clouds and choppy ocean swells. It rains often, forcing characters to awkwardly run for cover in their flip-flops. At home, George Clooney, his hair greying with worry, sits up at nights, working on legal papers. There’s not a slice of guava to be seen and pineapples are extinct. In short, this is all a far cry from the reverie of Elvis Presley’s “Paradise Hawaiian Style”.

Clooney plays Matt King, father to a ten-year-old tearaway Scottie (Amara Miller) and her equally rebellious sister Alexandra (Shailene Woodley). The Kings, and by that I mean the extended family of cousins and aunts living across a number of islands, are preparing to sell a large parcel of land which has been in the family for generations. Resort developers promise the clan untold millions. Matt, however, has other preoccupations. His wife, recently injured in a boating accident, lies in a coma. She will never recover, doctors tell him. Matt has to break the news to his wayward breed and, in the process, assume the role of parent.

None of this is new territory for Clooney who, at various times in his career, has taken delight in portraying misguided zealots (“The Men Who Stare at Goats”), soulless suits (“Up In The Air”) and dandyish egotists (“O’ Brother, Where Art Thou?”). In truth, he is more restrained here. We can’t imagine the Clooney of “Ocean’s Eleven” as anything other than a fussy, if suave, lothario. In contrast, when his daughter asks him what he’d like to eat in a restaurant, he waves her away with “Order me anything”. His clothing, for the most part, consists of half-sleeved shirts, shorts and flip-flops. Yet as storms close around his family, Matt takes stock of the situation and steers the King clan away from looming danger. Clooney’s is a subtle performance, free of histrionics.

“The Descendants” also bookends a series of four films about men in crisis, which started with Matthew Broderick fraying at the seams in “Election”. In that film, Broderick’s middle aged angst, expressed through his all-or-nothing hatred of a high school over-achiever, was a comic exaggeration which sealed the character’s fall from grace. In “Sideways”, Paul Giamatti showed us that men stop living when they too eagerly embrace their obsessions. In “The Descendants”, Clooney isn’t looking to upend his life: he wants to make up for his previous absenteeism. When he learns of his dying wife’s affair and travels with his eldest daughter to confront the object of her unfaithfulness – a property dealer called Brian Speer – Matt doesn’t resort to threats, abuse or violence. The scene is quietly played out in Speer’s holiday home, at an island in the kitchen. He even agrees not to inform the salesman’s wife of his transgressions.

In the end, death marks the end of the whole affair. After his wife passes away, the family scatters her ashes at sea. And in the most peaceful moment of an otherwise blustery film, Matt later settles down to eat ice cream and watch television with his children. The scene, which runs for nearly 90 seconds, is near silent and has the Kings watching a TV set in front of them. For the first time in a while, it seems, the bad weather has vanished.