The Descendants

Rating: 1.5/5

Welcome, my friends, to Oscar season. Expect to see a lot of period dramas, serious character pieces, indie darlings, and films about quirky but happy families that are interrupted but brought closer together as a result. Seriously, look at every year from like 2005 onward and every category, especially the last one, pops up. From the very good The Squid and the Whale a while back to last year's ok The Kids are All Right, these films are commonplace and often pretentious. Here to prove that stereotype is The Descendants; a true example of Oscar Bait.

Matt King (George Clooney) us a wealthy and detached lawyer living in Hawaii whose wife is in a coma after a serious accident. Matt is sitting on top of his a huge plot of land that his cousins want to develop into hotels, but he's not sure. It also turns out that Matt's wife was having an affair with a developer (Matthew Lillard) who has interests in Matt's sale. For the first time, Matt looks at his life and sees the imperfections. Now with the help of his "quirky" daughter (Shailene Woodley) and some unexpected allies, Matt has to work it all out.

The Squid and the Whale, Little Miss Sunshine, The Kids are All Right, Juno, and The Descendants. While individually unique, each film is, at its core, about a seemingly perfect group of upper-middle-class white people who are in transition with one another. Get ready for sex jokes, kids cursing like sailors, one-on-one character development, "eclectic" soundtracks, and old people not getting it. Films like this are released almost every single year around Oscar season, get lauded by major critics, take out full ads in the paper, and don't usually win. And out of all these examples, The Descendants is the most mundane.

I did not like this movie. Every shot, every line of dialog, every character, every performance, and every direction is tantamount to a cookie cutter Oscar film. Each element of The Descendants has been done a million times. But here it just doesn't work. The script and story are completely fake, George Clooney is the same as every drama he's made since Michael Clayton, Shailene Woodley is very annoying, and it's boring. The Descendants is a movie a lot of critics will love, but that does not make it good. This is a film anyone could have made. Combine that with a very cheesy ending, and that's what we have here.

George Clooney wants to win the Oscar for best actor. I believe that is a major reason he made Up In the Air and The Descendants. However Up In the Air featured Clooney as a character with genuine conflict in a story about the real issue of massive corporate downsizing. The Descendants insensitively presents a tragedy as an interruption of the lives of generic characters with superficial conflicts. It's pretentious, very badly acted, obnoxious, and unpleasant to watch.