The Descendants (Friday, November 18, 2011) (100)

Alexander Payne's newest film, The Descendants, has a lot going on in a pretty modest little movie. George Clooney plays the father of young girls, one is 10 and the other is 17, and his wife is in a coma in the hospital after a massive head injury. They live in Honolulu and seem like pretty normal, nice people. As Clooney is reeling from his wife's situation, he finds out that she had been cheating on him for a few months. Meanwhile, his family owns a significant amount of land in a trust that they're being forced to sell and he is the final decision-maker about whom to sell the land to. At some point Clooney and his daughters, along with the older daughter's stoner boyfriend, go to find the man his wife was cheating with, only to discover there might be some ramifications of that affair in the land deal.

The central motif of the film is family, and that makes me really sleepy because that's a dumb thing to make a movie about.There are a bunch of tangents to the story and it's much too complicated for what it needs to be. I think there is probably a pretty decent movie that could be reformed from the skeleton of this one just about the wife being in a coma, having had an affair; there is no need for the land deal part or the daughter's dumb boyfriend part.

If the script for the film, by Payne, Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, were cleaner and better, this could ultimately be a good movie. It's very small and really doesn't have the materials to be more than just good. Probably the most remarkable thing about it is that Clooney really looks like a normal middle-aged dad in this, not the gorgeous movie star that he has become over the past decade or so. I give lots of credit to Clooney, Payne and the costume designer, Wendy Chuck, who really transform him and make him seem totally normal, desexualized and not at all hot.

Stars: 2.5 of 3