D.O.A. at the Movies: Descendants

I have a shiny new movie buddy so we went to see Descendants yesterday afternoon since there was absolutely nothing else out I wanted to see.

The story is Matthew King (George Clooney who has been an unlikeable heel in my book since his role in ER) has a wife in the hospital who is in a coma after an accident. He has two wild and ill behaved daughters (one ten, one seventeen) that he can't quite cope with.

The he finds out that his wife has no brain activity/response etc and she has an Advanced Directive that demands they pull the plug in such a situation. While trying to cope with this and figure out how to tell family and friends, his older daughter lets him know that she wasn't getting along with mom because mom was having an affair.




What follows is a slow acceptance of his wife's imminent death and a determination to meet the man she was having an affair with face to face, both to tell him off and to give the man a chance to see his wife a last time.

Characterization was really well done for every character, especially George. He was perhaps clueless about the workings of his family but he struggled to do the right thing by his daughters and friends and ultimately his wife.

I'm used to action packed films so the very slow pace of this movie was a bit hard for me. I do think they could have cut out at least a half hour of the film that they spent sloooowly panning over the landscape of Hawaii, the flowers, and George's face in closeup. His acting was very fine, but not that fine.

I cringed when they put the wife's ashes in that beautiful, pristine Hawaiian water.

One of the things I love about going to the movies is seeing previews. The previews for this one were all just terrible looking movies. Ack. Could not say what a single one was but they were theoretically touchy feely character driven films.