The Descendants

In Alexander Payne's "About Schmidt," aging Warren Schmidt lays his wife to rest. As he goes through her belongings, he discovers love letters. Turns out his wife had an affair with his good friend. It could be a sad moment, but Schmidt uses it as an opportunity. He attacks his friend with unrepentant glee, happy to find a release from his anger and sadness.

Payne's "The Descendants," presents a similar scenario. But there are a couple of important distinctions. Here the cuckolded husband's wife is not dead--she's dying. Moreover, the husband is not left alone--he has two daughters who are growing up way too fast.

And these differences mean that the husband, Matt King (George Clooney), can't simply fly off the handle. He has to learn how to forgive his wife, look inside himself, and figure out his mistakes as a husband and father.

This is sappy stuff. In the hands of many directors, it would turn into a Lifetime movie. (My mistake: in the Lifetime version, it would have to be the husband who cheated on the wife.) Luckily, we have Payne at the helm. He's able to elevate the material, but he can't entirely redeem it.

It's pretty obvious early on in the film that King hasn't spent enough time with his family. But Payne doesn't overemphasize the point, as so many teary family dramas do, because this is only one aspect of who King is as a person. In fact, all the characters are shown to be more complex than they initially appear.

Trouble is, this movie--and King in particular--are a bit too compassionate. Many critics have complained that Payne turned the debonair Clooney into a frumpy Everyman. But the real problem is that King is too much of a martyr, taking abuse from all sides with just a little too much grace and understanding.

"The Descendants" is honest--people really are multifaceted, as the film suggests--but not quite true to life--people aren't this forgiving. The acerbic wit, the mean edge, of Payne's previous work is largely gone here. We would all like to be as magnanimous as Matt King, but the truth is that most of us have quite a bit of Warren Schmidt in us too.