Before we issue today’s edition of “It’s All Happening”, here’s the marvelous Chris Corbellini with a brand new, um, thing for us: “Upon Further Review.” This is where Chris returns to a film he saw awhile ago, and with the benefit of time and perspective provides an even more insightful essay. It’s kind of like twice-baked potatoes-meets-film criticism. This is not to be confused with “Upon Fuhrer Review”, which we plan to introduce next week. Here’s Chris…

Upon Further Review: The Descendants

by Chris Corbellini

My first screening of “The Descendants” told me what I already knew: Hawaii is the Leonard-Hagler of tourist spots, a heavenly, hype-busting spit of sand and coral and pools of aquamarine. Halfway through the film the camera cranes over George Clooney and his family as they stare at an unspoiled coast that is a key plot point of the picture, and several patrons in the theater gasped in awe. The land had the best part in the movie. Walking home through a crosswind in frozen and bitter-about-it NYC, I wondered … if this movie were set in Omaha and the mother’s accident happened on an icy road, would people show up to watch? But there’s no denying the re-watchability of it now, as produced on a beach towel in the Pacific. More than a year later “The Descendants” is replayed on HBO virtually every afternoon, becoming a candidate for the 21st Century’s “Just One Of the Guys,” and I thought I’d give it another try.

A Rumination With a View

“Paradise? Paradise can go f-ck itself.”

Writer-director Alexander Payne likes to tell stories about men who must take a bite out of the sloppy poop panini that is sometimes our everyday existence, and then, when they make A Big Decision, those characters must gaze at that panini, sniff it, then wolf it all down in agonizing gulps. In “The Descendants” Payne maps out another tale of emotional awful, and by the third act Clooney has taken so many blows to the psyche he’s seemingly driven downward into the sand. The world-famous actor seems smaller and slighter in his slumped shoulders by the final frames. He also finally looks like a dad.

Sir Salt-and-Pepper plays a lawyer named Matt King, and the story (based on a book by Kaui Hart Hemmings) is as simple and stately as the name. King’s thrill-seeking wife is in a coma after a boating accident and within the first few minutes a doctor gives him somber news no husband wants to hear. He elevates to QB1 after being the “back-up parent” with two daughters who are molded in his spouse’s willful image, and tries not to drown. In doing so, his oldest confesses that mommie dearest was skipping out on him with another man, a Tommy Bahama-wearing real estate anti-Christ. Instead of it all playing out vindictively, the main character decides he wants whatever consistency he can find in his girls’ lives, and perhaps preserve a slice of Kauai who’s sole rightful owner should be the sun. The hints were there from the first few edits: “You give your children enough money to do something but not enough to do nothing,” King says. Right. How would you like your poop panini prepared, Mr King?

Yeah, but think about the estate tax.

Watching the climactic signature scene again, I noticed Clooney is barefoot. He isn’t wearing shoes during an angry confrontation with his wife’s friends about her infidelity either, and neither are they (“You were putting lipstick on a corpse!!”). It’s just as well – Hawaii has to be felt on your bare skin to be appreciated and it’s a nice little costume detail. One of the funniest bits of the movie is when King is actually wearing the wrong shoes as he spastically runs through his neighborhood, and you can hear the slaps of his Dockers on the road. It sounds so … perfectly awkward.  Staying with the technical aspects here that I missed the first time, I spotted two interesting camera shots, filmed for the sake of interesting camera shots: when Clooney’s oldest daughter, played by Shailene Woodley, is caught drinking at her school and tries to evade a searching flashlight, and later, when she screams while submerged in the deep end of a pool. The score was probably the easiest choice for any director that year – local flavor – and that music tickles the footage in the right places (the standout moments: when Clooney dips beneath a bush looking at his wife’s lover, and when a nurse explains the inevitable to the youngest daughter).

All these tiny details and heartbreak add up to an three-star ocean resort of a movie, and Payne doesn’t push it any further.

You have to want to spend two hours with a shell-shocked family, and that’s where the Kings run up the score. When the Beau Bridges character reveals how a man named Brian Speer factors into the land decision at a local bar, Clooney slowly slumps away and his face is molten misery. The close-up reaction was so good, in fact, that the editor uses a “jump cut,” showing the actor twice from the same angle as he plops into a chair. The younger daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) somehow has the best comic timing, and Woodley spits out every line like she just downed a shot of Red Bull. During the confrontation scene with the adulterer on a beach house porch the angst-y teen becomes dad’s Scottie Pippen for good – at that moment it looks like the two actors share the same DNA. The only speech I felt was off that I enjoyed the first go-around was actress Judy Greer’s moment at the mother’s bedside. It felt like overkill. By the time Mr. King says his own goodbye (truly gutting), I’d seen way too many teary-eyed confessionals.

At the end of the day, you’re eating ice cream on a couch in Hawaii with George Clooney. Chin up, girls.

And I still think the grandest performers are the islands of Hawaii. There’s a misty morning scene when King is jogging on the beach and passes the man he’s been looking for, the stranger in the strangers-in-the-night equation, and it’s one of the most stunning settings I’ve seen captured on film. Perhaps that’s the larger point of the movie – this is the silhouette-on-the-beach beauty that’s passing us all by while we are so wrapped up in our heads and tragedies. Then again, perhaps not.  Matt King is looking out for his kids, above all. Hardly a novel thought but worth revisiting on a wintry afternoon, especially with all that tropical island real estate porn around.