SEVEN years ago, director Alexander Payne hit the jackpot with ‘Sideways’, and now he follows up with The Descendants, tipped to bring further Academy Award success his way.
The story is adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, who narrates from the point of view of a middle-aged man, Matt King (George Clooney), who hails from Hawaiian royalty, but is very much a man of the world.
Matt’s family is a mixture of white and native Hawaiian. On the Hawaiian side, they are descended from King Kamehameha, a person of wealth and property.
He is main trustee of over 25,000 acres of beautiful land on Kauai that the family is planning to sell.
But there are other threads to this enjoyable movie, one in which we see the softer side of Clooney.
His wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) has an accident on a speedboat, and is left in a coma in a hospital.
Matt, a lawyer, must take charge of his two daughters, aged 10 and 17. And shortly he must make the hardest decision of all, to follow his wife’s wishes when it turns out she won’t emerge from the coma.
The property sale decision is looming. And then, a secret comes out about his wife that preoccupies all three. 115 minutes.
