"The Descendants," a tragicomedy starring George Clooney, closed the 31st Hawaii International Film Festival on Sunday — the perfect choice, given that the film is set in Hawaii, features local actors and music, and is based on a novel by local author Kaui Hart Hemmings.
The screen is dark, with the rattle and hum of a motorboat slapping across the waves. A reverse shot shows the boater, Elizabeth King, with the Waikiki skyline in the background.
The opening shots also show traffic jams on the H-1 freeway and homeless people on South King Street.
"The view from the mainland is that we live in paradise," the voice-over tells us, but the images contradict that narrative. And thus begin at least two strands that run through the film: Oahu as perceived from the mainland and from on-island.
The boating ends badly, as Elizabeth (local actor Patricia Hastie) suffers a head injury and falls into a coma.
Three weeks later we find Matt King (Clooney) trying unsuccessfully to reconnect with and take care of his two daughters in his wife’s absence. He is an attorney who with his cousins inherited vast acres of untrammeled land in Hawaii from ancestors both royal and missionary. When the cousins meet in King’s law offices to discuss whether to sell the land, the shot out of the window is iconic: Iolani Palace and the state Capitol.
In part the film, directed by Alexander Payne ("Sideways," "About Schmidt"), is about the coming of age of a middle-age man who had thus far been more fixated on his work than his wife or family. His wife’s hospitalization forces him to suddenly reconsider his life and his priorities.
His daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller), are rebellious and maladjusted, and King is rather clueless, initially, about how to engage with them.
Scottie, 10, has been bullying classmates with cruel text messages. King decides to bring his daughter Alexandra, 17, home from boarding school to help him care for Scottie. But when he goes to pick up Alexandra, although it is late in the evening, she is not in her room, but out on the school grounds, drinking.
"What is it that makes the women in my life want to destroy themselves?" he muses. His own family members and what makes them tick remain mysteries to him. His estrangement is palpable.
In a classic scenario of adolescents who are better than their parents at recognizing what is going on and how best to address it, Alexandra ultimately teaches her dad how to be a parent.
No words are exchanged. They need none. They know how to be together and support one another.
Undoubtedly, Hawaii audiences of "The Descendants" will understand aspects of the film perhaps lost on viewers elsewhere. Pidgin, although not abundant, surfaces here and there. Glass balls or floats are common in houses. Lollipop plants and sunburst pincushions abound in vases. Banyan trees surround Matt King’s house in an old-money neighborhood. The settings include Kikila, aka the White Estate outside Laie, where Punahou School students spend their senior skip day.
And when Matt and his cousins meet there to decide whether to sell their land for profit, Matt addresses them in a telling tone: "Look. We’re haole as s—. We go to private schools. We barely speak pidgin. We don’t even speak Hawaiian."
The soundtrack — scored exclusively with Hawaiian music, classical and modern — features local musicians such as Keola Beamer, Sonny Chillingworth, Dennis Kamakahi, Ray Kane, Lena Machado, Gabby Pahinui and Jeff Peterson.
"The Descendants," which screened at the Telluride, Colo., and Toronto film festivals, is enjoyable for its portrayal of all-too-familiar family tensions, recognizable regardless of whether the viewer is a parent or a teen. Its story about Hawaii — history, royalty, missionaries and land struggles — is told in a manner that is engaging, not heavy-handed.
Highly recommended, the film will be released in theaters Nov. 18.
Christina Gerhardt is an assistant professor of German at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her writings about film have been published or are forthcoming in Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly and Screen.
