Sorry if I got your hopes up: no, this isn’t about that Disney Channel movie series shipping Maleficent’s kid and Beast’s kid … This is a very different type of movie.
Alexander Payne’s 2011 film, The Descendants, sees us sitting with Hawaiian lawyer, Matt King, as he is opposite his comatose wife, praying that she’ll get better so that they can work to salvage their marriage. We hear him saying, “I’m ready to talk. I’m ready to change. I’m ready to be a real husband. Just wake up, please.”
He does not get that opportunity. Turns out her condition is worsening, and now he gets to gather their loved ones together so they can say goodbye before they take her off life-support.
But that’s not all.
Turns out his wife was also cheating on him and was even planning on initiating a divorce she could leave him. Matt gets to navigate this for himself while also steering his daughters through this ordeal–his daughters who kind of hate him. (As all this is going down, he and his super-rich, super-influential cousins are faced with selling a sizable plot of land, and this sale will have tremendous impact on the economy of the island.) Matt and his daughters resolve to find the one bit of closure in reach and reach out to the man who nearly tore apart their family. Might as well let him say goodbye, right?
This movie comes from the same writers who wrote and directed The Way, Way Back, one of my favorite movies of all time. This movie has a similar humor to it, but it’s also a few shades heavier. Rash and Faxon do a really great job at using the backdrop of paradise to reveal latent ennui and even aching, and that’s certainly at work here.
I think my favorite thing about this movie is that it just finds the least pleasant, least ideal scenario a person can find themselves in (barring being forced to like flee your country or something) and just forces the viewer to sit with that. Matt’s already struck in this tailspin with his wife’s accident, and then to have this massive bombshell drop–with absolutely no chance of closure or reprieve–is just the height of misfortune. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to just check out and leave someone else to clean up this mess. That’s what any of us would want to do in this situation. But … how many of us get that option? When the unimaginable happens, we still have to find ways to work through the mess.
Midway through, Matt compares their family to the Hawaiian archipelago–a body of islands who belong to one unit but are themselves separate. Working through this has Matt confront his involvement in this deterioration within his family. A fact that gets repeated throughout the film is that this distance he feels with between his wife and between his kids started to grow as he threw himself into his work. This crisis puts him in the position where, for the first time in a while, he has to be an emotional anchor for his kids.
The movie is very honest about how ugly that kind of heightened emotion can look pouring out of a person. There’re a lot of heightened emotion and a lot of volatile confrontations. Matt’s first (um …) confrontation with his wife after finding out about the affair has him ripping her apart for betraying him. But a minute later, though, his daughter comes in to express something similar, and Matt immediately reprimands her for speaking to her mother that way.
Part of what this says to me is that even with all this ripening anger, that love still somehow abides. That’s something that he and his family get to discover, and that brings them together. As they’re all given a target of mutual anger, and opportunities to confront them together, something very counterintuitive happens. Matt and his daughters become just unguarded enough to find solace in one another. They start to become a real family again.
I don’t imagine that my cross is the heaviest, but I have seen my share of trials, of situations that I wish I could just tune out. I occasionally struggle to reconcile the promise of my spiritual knowledge with the looming shadow of my very real obstacles.
But my favorite thing about films like this is that they’re honest about how, yes, life honestly kinda sucks. Sometimes really badly. But even at their most triggering, there is still serenity. There is still peace. And I have no other word for that other than divine.
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