George Clooney as "Matt King" and Shailene Woodley as "Alexandra" in The Descendants.
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In wrestling the Hemmings book into movie form, Payne and co-screenwriters Nat Faxon and Jim Rash begin by having Clooney do voice-over narration. His observations can be amusing — "Some of the most powerful people in Hawaii look like bums and stuntmen" — but the approach is unimaginative, as if the film were setting out to be a video-book of the novel. (The voice-over eventually disappears.) For the next hour we trot around with Matt as he informs relatives of Liz's condition and susses out clues about her secret beau. These characters are often daubed with too broad a brush: they are either so laid-back as to be supine or, in the case of Liz's father Scott (Robert Forster, who's excellent), fiercely resentful and choleric. When Sid ignorantly giggles at Scott's Alzheimer's-afflicted wife, the old man punches the young one in the face.
That's a reprimand audiences had been wishing for, since Sid has been acting the idiot. Later we are told this island ignoramus was a member of his school's chess club, and Sid is meant to be revealed as a solid citizen and mensch. Payne pursues this tactic throughout the film: caricaturing people before he tries to humanize them. But the characters don't ripen organically; they're first one thing, then another. In a few instances the change is more subtle, as with Alex the teen daughter, who in a one-sided conversation with her unresponsive mother whispers, "I always wanted to be like you. I am like you, I'm exactly like you." Alex might be the daughter in another love-and-death family epic playing here, the Franco-Canadian Canadian Café de Flore — a bolder narrative experiment than The Descendants, and a film that sustains its emotional equilibrium in a story about the one who loves and the one who leaves.
Not until its final act does The Descendants ascend — in terms of Payne's filmography, go Sideways — into sharp social comedy. Until then, Clooney is almost single-handedly responsible for what goes right. His smile has always semaphored a knowing indulgence for life's ridiculous aspects, and he instantly slips under the skin and into the Hawaiian couture of Matt, a cuckolded hero trying to register a pained gravitas while wearing shorts and flipflops. He suavely navigates Matt's internal pilgrimage: from the first awful news — with a look of gray devastation, as if he is channeling his wife's coma by becoming a member of the walking dead — to the shouldering of parental responsibility and the grudge match with the man who took his place in Elizabeth's affections.
As a star, Clooney is a master of Q&A banter; as an actor, he turns Matt's churning emotions into verses in the liturgy of grieving and redemption. It's just a shame that the rest of The Descendants had risen to meet the baffled, resilient humanity he pours into it.