George Clooney Tackles Dark Humor

A magnificently soulful Clooney anchors 'The Descendants', with his potent combination of sadness and laughter

Merie Wallace/courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures

George Clooney may or may not be a melancholy man, but he sure can play one in the movies, whether it's the fed-up fixer in Michael Clayton, the gobsmacked lonely guy in Up in the Air, or the compromised idealist in The Ides of March. Luckily for him, and us, he's also immensely funny on screen and off.

That potent combination of sadness and an ­irrepressible sense of the absurd lurking within it transforms screenwriter-director Alexander Payne's The ­Descendants into an unsentimental film that can still make you cry. Clooney is Matt King, the head of two ­families: One is a sprawling Anglo-Hawaiian dynasty whose members, if Matt gives the go-ahead, stand to make a ­fortune by selling their centuries-old inheritance, an ­unblemished 25,000-acre spread on famously beautiful Kauai; the other is a trio of problematic females—Matt's wild, daredevil wife, Elizabeth ­(Patricia Hastie), lying comatose in the hospital after a boating accident, and their daughters, 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), who drop F-bombs on their ­father in endless punishing salvos. The land on Kauai is a ­gorgeous metaphor for the ties that bind families—and what it means to clip them. The ­family within the clan embodies those ties, seen in intimate close-up and stressed to the breaking point.

Payne won the adapted-screenplay Oscar for his last movie, 2004's marvelous antiromance Sideways, and should collect more glittering prizes with this one. But The Descen­dants also reflects the boldness that put Payne on the map with 1996's Citizen Ruth, a scabrous social comedy about abortion. The Descendants is no Terms of Endearment (as good as that teary film is); even as it ­poignantly captures the drawn-out torment of prospective loss, what that loss exposes is nothing less than a comic call to arms.

The mischievous tone of this movie is set as an overwhelmed Matt makes his way home from the hospital through heavy ­traffic in a Honolulu so overbuilt with business towers and high-rise condos that the famous majesty of Hawaii's corrugated lava mountains is completely obscured. Musing grimly on Elizabeth's deteriorating condition, he finally snarls, "Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself!"—at which point you can't help feeling that there's probably worse to come. And of course, there is: Families are ­veritable ­factories of worse-to-come. (Did I mention that when we meet Alex, she's sneaking out of her boarding school for ­troubled kids to party with friends?) Payne repeatedly ­reverts to the tragic state of Matt's wife and in flashback glimpses lets us see her in all her reckless glory. But the ­engine that drives The Descen­dants is much more entertaining: Matt's mortifying ­discovery that she had been cheating on him, up to the very ­moment of her dire accident. That he's the last to know—and has to hear it from his older daughter—confirms the girls' complaint that he retreats into his work at the ­expense of his family. Payne is also showing us the unhappy fractures in this ostensibly good marriage.

Horribly funny is a Payne specialty: Witness the infamous scene in Sideways when Sandra Oh beats the bejesus out of Thomas Haden Church with her motorcycle helmet after learning that he's not just two-timing her, he's about to get ­married. It's hard to imagine that Payne could top that scene, but he does, with something longer and more ­intricate, when Matt, accompanied by an ­insistent Alex, ­decides to confront his wife's erstwhile ­lover—at the lover's home, no less. Finely played by ­Matthew ­Lillard, he's a surprisingly ordinary Joe, an outclassed if stalwart local realtor named Brian. Watching him, you can only imagine how Elizabeth must have ripped through his life like a sexual cyclone, and now here's Matt the thunder god come to complete the chaos. But everyone, including Judy Greer as Brian's sweet wife, is great in this appalling but delicious set piece, which works so well because nothing about it is exaggerated. On the contrary, it's so real you almost feel guilty for watching.

That mix of transgression and restraint isn't just a specialty of Payne's: It's his signature, one rare enough that there was palpable relief at the ­Toronto film festival when The Descendants turned up to close the seven-year gap since Sideways, another funny movie laced with hurt. The comedy Payne excels at is the human kind, which can—and inevitably does—turn to tragedy in a blink. In the end, what else is there for us but love and death?

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