George Clooney as Steward in "The Descendants"

We chose to go see The Descendants from the flood of interesting movies out now for different reasons. Gretchen’s primary reason begins with the initials G.C. Among the reasons I was interested was the advertising campaign, which makes it look like a comedy. But don’t be deceived. I knew the pedigree of the film’s director, and knew the movie would have depth. If you want lighthearted fare, don’t stop here. But if you want to be moved, to think about life and what makes it worth living, give The Descendants a whirl.

In my slightly skewed opinion, this is a movie about that horribly unfashionable church word “stewardship,” and how a mid-life crisis enables someone to take seriously the things in life that he holds in trust. George Clooney plays Matt King, an attorney and a descendant of the royal family of Hawaii. His crisis is ushered in by an accident to his wife that leaves her in a coma, and the discovery that she’d been unfaithful to him. The events made me think of the way Richard Rohr maps out mid-life issues in his book Falling Upwards, a book I wrote about in a post called Genuine Wisdom in July.

According to Rohr (and many others) there are two distinct stages of life. The first half is about achieving success and accomplishing goals. Eventually, something happens that we don’t have the emotional and spiritual energy to resolve, and the meaninglessness of the first half of life is revealed. The second half of life is about meaning, making peace with mortality, and deepening spiritually. It’s about discovering intimacy, depth and loss. This is the way I expressed it in a sermon I preached earlier this year: During the second half of life we live fully aware of paradox and irony and above all the tragic sense of life where success is found in failure and life is found in death. We want certainty and clear answers in the first half of life but live comfortably with doubt and uncertainty in the second half of life. We want things to be black or white in the first half of life, but realize there are two sides to everything in creation in the second half of life. We know our selves are filled with both shadow and light, and know everyone else must be that way, too.

There are multiple story lines going on in The Descendants. Matt King is sole trustee of thousands of breathtaking acres of undeveloped land on the island of Kauai. He and his cousins are poised to make millions from the sale of the land. His wife’s accident coincides with the decision to be made about this property. We also gather from the interactions between Matt and his daughters that he’s been a largely absentee father (“I am the back-up parent,” he says. “The understudy.”) As he comes to grip with who his daughters are and what it might mean to actually behave like their father, he also comes to grip with his wife’s betrayal of their marriage. Hence, as I see it, the question of the movie: what does it mean to be a steward of what you hold in trust? On one level, he holds the undeveloped land in trust, on another level he holds his daughters in trust, on yet another level he holds his relationship with his comatose wife in trust. The fact that she has violated that trust does not excuse him from it. How would you market that if you were a Hollywood studio? What they’ve decided to do is show a clip of Clooney running which looks funny and a few clips of some of the sharp-edged, humorous lines between characters. There is a lot more to the movie than that.

There are great performances that create powerfully realistic characters. Robert Forster is particularly memorable as Clooney’s angry father-in-law, unrelenting in his feeling that if Clooney had been a better husband the accident never would have happened. Beau Bridges is one of Clooney’s island-mellow cousins, who, beneath the laid-back veneer, will go to war to get the land sold. Shailene Woodley is wonderful as Clooney’s oldest daughter, as is Nick Krause as her spacey friend Sid. And then there is Clooney, in one his best performances in a long while. Don’t be surprised to see his name when Academy Award nominations come out. They all come across as very real people and you’re never sure how they will behave in any situation.

This is a movie from Alexander Payne, who has shown his willingness to portray people realistically in films like Sideways and About Schmidt. (I also remember how the setting of those films – the California Wine Country and Nebraska – practically became characters. Payne does that again, this time with Hawaii.) Like The Descendants, those movies all have funny moments, but they aren’t particularly funny movies. There is more pathos than humor, and if you liked the pathos of Payne’s earlier offerings, you won’t be disappointed by The Descendants.