The buzz about this film has been Oscar-worthy, but the actual film is a major disappointment, particularly because it was co-written and directed by Alexander Payne, whose earlier films include the brilliant SIDEWAYS and ELECTION, and whose 7-year absence from film has been deeply felt.
THE DESCENDANTS feels more like Payne's ABOUT SCHMIDT, which gave Jack Nicholson a good late-career role but was still just another road movie. This film feels underwritten and too often predictable. There is little doubt where we are going, but Payne's journey to get us there is too often uncertain in tone. Scenes and incidents, some funny, others sad, are set up, and then don't pay off.
Clooney gives a good, understated performance, but his character's changes, from selfish, stingy, uncaring father and husband, to loving, concerned dad and human being, are never dramatized; we're just supposed to accept it. The whole cast is good, even Nick Krause in the Keanu Reeves role from "Parenthood" (the scene where the dopey teen gives advice to Clooney about his daughter is the same as Reeves giving advice to Dianne Wiest in the earlier film).
Some times it feels as though the film were too heavily edited, and the missing scenes would have answered all our questions and satisfied our emotional needs. Perhaps reality TV has inured us to "real" drama, and Payne is simply reflecting an audience's inability to respond to a non-reality dramedy. Just hypothetical, but how else to explain the ultimate emptiness of an "important" film that just doesn't deliver?
THE DESCENDANTS feels more like Payne's ABOUT SCHMIDT, which gave Jack Nicholson a good late-career role but was still just another road movie. This film feels underwritten and too often predictable. There is little doubt where we are going, but Payne's journey to get us there is too often uncertain in tone. Scenes and incidents, some funny, others sad, are set up, and then don't pay off.
Clooney gives a good, understated performance, but his character's changes, from selfish, stingy, uncaring father and husband, to loving, concerned dad and human being, are never dramatized; we're just supposed to accept it. The whole cast is good, even Nick Krause in the Keanu Reeves role from "Parenthood" (the scene where the dopey teen gives advice to Clooney about his daughter is the same as Reeves giving advice to Dianne Wiest in the earlier film).
Some times it feels as though the film were too heavily edited, and the missing scenes would have answered all our questions and satisfied our emotional needs. Perhaps reality TV has inured us to "real" drama, and Payne is simply reflecting an audience's inability to respond to a non-reality dramedy. Just hypothetical, but how else to explain the ultimate emptiness of an "important" film that just doesn't deliver?