Accepting our humanity
One of my two picks this year for the “Best Picture” Oscar is Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. (The other, Martin Scorcese’s enchanting children’s tale Hugo will be reviewed in an upcoming column.) In The Descendants, as in his previous movies, Payne proves to be a master at portraying life’s full reach – both its messiness and its wonder. Particularly in his last movies (Election, About Schmidt, and Sideways),and now again in this movie, Payne has focused his keen eye and gifted pen on memorable, lead, male characters who learn to accept their full humanity as failed dreams and difficult circumstances invite personal growth.

One blogger commenting on The Descendants recalled the Beatles’ lyric, “Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.” And so it is in this movie. It is sometimes life’s happenstance that becomes the occasion for discovering life’s possibility.

As with other Payne movies, The Descendants is emotionally rich. Both funny and sad, sad and funny, its story line is honest and smart. Though it could easily slip into melodrama, the movie avoids the saccharine and the predictable, both through its fundamental realism and through a series of plot surprises.

Learning to be a father
Matt King (George Clooney) is living a seemingly charmed life as the movie begins. A successful lawyer living in Hawaii, he is the sole trustee of the family legacy, the “last huge parcel of virgin Hawaiian land” on the coast of Kauai, a plot worth millions. But he also admits, “I’m basically the back-up parent. The understudy.”

All this quickly changes, however, as after a brief look at his vivacious, athletic wife, Elizabeth, water-skiing, we discover she has had an accident and is in a coma in a Honolulu hospital. Matt is in need of gathering his two daughters and beginning to learn to be a father.

Any thought of paradise quickly vanishes, as it becomes all too clear that Matt hardly knows his daughters, even if he needs to be their parent. Ten year old Scottie (Amara Miller) already has a foul mouth and is in trouble for emailing classmates about sex, and seventeen year old Alex (Shailene Woodley), a cynical teenager who has been shipped out to a boarding school given her drug and relationships problems, is angry and confused. In a voiceover, Matt confesses that he and his girls are like “parts of an archipelago,” related, but “separate and alone.” To make matters worse, Alex soon loses her composure and tells her dad that he is stupid for not realizing that their mom has been having an affair under his nose. And so it becomes clear to him and to us that he doesn’t know all three of the women in his life.

And thus, a family journey begins as the father and his daughters, together with Alex’s stoner boyfriend Sid, first travel to inform Elizabeth’s parents of the tragedy and then to “inform” her “lover” in Kauai. But as with all road movies, there is also an internal journey, one that begins with sorrow, guilt, and anger, but eventuates in acceptance, self-discovery, love, and forgiveness. Lacking much of a plot, but filled with small surprises and deep insight as the four pick up life’s pieces, The Descendants is the story of Matt’s journey into wholeness.

The legacy
As the family (plus Sid) comes to know each other, a second storyline is intertwined. Will Matt sell his ancestral land for the millions that his cousin covets? The pristine beachfront is their legacy from the 19th-century marriage of a Hawaiian princess and a white missionary.  Interestingly, Payne does not show viewers the land, even in pictures, until later in the film. The 25,000 acres remain an abstraction, a transaction to consider that can bring wealth to all. In the abstract, the sale of this land makes a certain sense. But when the family journey takes them to Kauai and viewers see together with Matt, Sid, and the girls its breathtaking unspoiled beauty, we change our minds. Alex, perhaps remembering earlier times with her family on the beach doesn’t want her father to sell this “birthright.” The land is not just about money, but heritage, memory and stewardship. Viewers immediately know what Matt will ultimately do, but this doesn’t undercut our interest in the story. It is the family’s encounters along the way, whether with Elizabeth’s parents, the comatose Elizabeth, each other, or the family of their mom’s lover, that allow for insight, rhythm, and humor.

Particularly important in this journey is Alex’s friend Sid.  He is present in part for humor and texture, to keep the movie from sliding to the maudlin. But when Matt, the girls, and Sid visit Elizabeth to say their final good-bye, Sid becomes Matt’s teacher as well. Not able to sleep one night, Matt finds comfort from Sid, who has his own surprising story and his own real grief. Similarly, Elizabeth’s father, Scott, might be dismissed by viewers as merely the caricature of an angry, bitter man (his diatribe against Sid is hilarious and over-the-top); until, that is, we are able to peer through the door into Elizabeth’s room and see how loving this devastated father can be. All of a sudden, we ache with him. Perhaps the movie’s signature moment comes when Matt confronts Elizabeth’s lover, a goofy realtor named Brian Speer who surprisingly is also the realtor handling the King property. A happily married man with two young kids, Matt must decide what he wants from Brian and his innocent wife. In the process, viewers see how far along the journey of compassion this lawyer/businessman has come.

Throughout the movie George Clooney is superb. As with his previous work directing Jack Nicholson, Matthew Broderick, and Paul Giamatti, Payne is able to help his lead actors transcend their iconic status. Clooney has no glamour as Matt King. When, for example, he reacts to the news of his wife’s infidelity by running out of the house and down the street for confirmation of the fact by a close friend, his middle-aged oafishness is apparent to all – and so too his pain. Indecisive at one moment and impulsive the next, resentful at times, but also filled with regret for his own neglect of the family, Matt is someone viewers come to care about. Many will even identify with him. As Matt learns to be more than a “back-up parent,” we also quietly cheer, hoping that one day the sorrow, guilt, and anger related to our own families might similarly be transformed.

Next steps

Meditate on Psalm 45:17. What “legacy” did the authors of this psalm hope to leave? What would a typical day have been like for them, as they worked to build up that legacy? What legacy are you hoping to leave? Talk with your spouse or a close Christian friend about this idea of leaving a legacy. Pray for and encourage one another in determining what kind of legacy God would have you to leave.

For more insight to this topic, order the book, Walk in Generational Blessings: Leaving a Legacy of Transformation through Your Family, by Joseph Mattera, from our online store. Or read the article, “The Lasting Contributions of a Wretched Worm,” by Timothy George.

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