Why The Descendants Doesn’t Work

                    The movie is intriguing to me because I enjoy George Clooney and believe he is more than capable of delivering beautiful performances (The Ides of March, for instance, was a beauty). His performance in The Descendants, however, was not his finest. Don’t continue reading this post unless you’ve seen the movie or don’t care (I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to resist giving plot points away), and please keep in mind that my comments stem from a love for George Clooney, the knowledge that he has done and will continue to do things much greater than this (Good Night and Good Luck!), and the conviction that the Academy made a poor choice in nominating Clooney for Best Actor this season (thankfully, he didn't win). The truth is, it could have been just beautiful. The film was set in Hawaii, and the plot involved ripe father/daughter tensions, which I am always a sucker for, yet the dialogue felt hollow and unbelievable (note Clooney’s middle of the night heart to heart with the dude his oldest daughter brings along on their quest to find his wife’s lover). Somehow, the biggest, most transformative moments in the movie that should have felt most gut-wrenching, felt surprisingly empty. For instance, at the end of the movie when his wife is about to get taken off life support (after being in a coma throughout the entirety of the film), George Clooney’s character says goodbye to her at her bedside and completely breaks down, recalling all the ways their marriage has changed his life, and normally in this sort of moment at the end of a movie, after the hours of emotional investment in the characters, particularly moments like these of life or death, I find myself completely lost in the world of whatever they happen to be feeling, in this case, their deep sorrow. In this movie, the goodbye-to-the-wife-in-a-coma-on-her-death-bed moment felt almost comedic because Clooney ends up blubbering something like, “My life! My love! My joy! My pain!” and when you don’t care about the characters, it just doesn’t matter, and George Clooney suddenly looks ridiculous and so does the woman with all the makeup lying in the hospital bed. The Descendants somehow managed to birth a fascinating familial predicament in an absolutely beautiful place and take the heart right out of it. Sorry, George, not even you could save this movie from itself.