Alexander Payne's Hawaii-set drama. George Clooney's first proper dramatic lead. The Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar.
Honolulu, contemporary. Matt King is a successful real-estate lawyer who has, by his own admission, been a 'back-up parent' across his two daughters' lives — his wife Elizabeth has been the primary parent, while Matt has focused on his work and on the family's complicated trust holding of a large parcel of Kauai coastal land. Elizabeth is now in a coma after a boating accident; she will not recover. Matt is left with the immediate work of telling his two daughters (17-year-old Alex, 10-year-old Scottie), of pursuing the complicated land-sale negotiation his extended-family trust requires, and — as he learns from Alex shortly after Elizabeth's hospitalisation — of dealing with the affair Elizabeth had been having with a local Honolulu real-estate broker.
The film tracks Matt across approximately one week. He travels to Kauai to confront his wife's lover; he confronts his extended family about the land-sale decision; he progressively reconnects with his daughters across the unfolding crisis. The film closes with Matt's decision to refuse the family's planned land sale, with Elizabeth's quiet death, and with Matt, Alex, and Scottie sharing ice cream on a couch in a small scene of resolved-if-uneasy family connection.
The Descendants's structural innovation is its treatment of Hawaii as an actual specific place rather than as a generic tourist setting. Most mainstream American films set in Hawaii treat the location as backdrop — the beach, the palm trees, the leis are decoration for plots that could, in principle, occur anywhere. Payne's film refuses this. The specific Hawaii of The Descendants includes its real-estate market, its Indigenous-land-rights history, its specific local class architecture, its actual residents (as opposed to tourists), its actual weather patterns and rainy December afternoons.
What this gives the film is dramatic substance that the conventional Hawaii-film framework does not produce. Matt King's relationship to the land — his trust-fund inheritance of significant Kauai acreage, the broader family argument about whether to sell, the underlying question of who 'owns' Hawaii — is the film's actual subject. The narrative spine of the wife's affair operates as the immediate crisis through which the broader land-and-identity material is engaged. The structural choice produces one of the most-respected American films ever made about Hawaii.
The Descendants was, by general critical consensus, George Clooney's first proper dramatic lead — the first role in his career that required him to operate primarily in dramatic register rather than in the charismatic-light-drama mode his previous starring work (Ocean's Eleven, Up in the Air, Michael Clayton even partly) had occupied. The performance required Clooney to play, in the early scenes, a man emotionally checked out from his marriage and from his daughters; in the middle act, a man processing the discovery of an affair against the impossibility of confronting his comatose wife; in the closing scenes, a man finally present for his daughters in ways the entire film has been preparing for.
Clooney was nominated for Best Actor at the 2012 Oscars. He lost to Jean Dujardin for The Artist. The performance has, in subsequent years, been increasingly recognised as among Clooney's strongest dramatic work. The structural achievement is, in some sense, that Clooney is playing against his established public persona — the assured, charming, controlled Clooney is, in The Descendants, replaced by a man whose assumed competence the film progressively reveals as a structural failure of attention to his own family. The willingness to play against type was, for an actor at Clooney's commercial standing, structurally unusual.
Shailene Woodley was 19 during production. The role of Alex King — Matt's 17-year-old daughter, who has been carrying the knowledge of Elizabeth's affair across months before Matt learns of it — required Woodley to operate at a dramatic register that mainstream American cinema rarely asks of young female performers. The character is structurally significant: Alex is the figure who tells Matt about the affair, who progressively takes on adult-equivalent emotional functions across the family's crisis, and whose interior development across the runtime is structurally parallel to Matt's.
The performance launched Woodley's career. She would subsequently star in The Fault in Our Stars (2014), the Divergent franchise (2014-2016), and Big Little Lies (HBO, 2017-2019). The Descendants supporting performance was nominated for several critics' awards and was widely considered one of the most-significant young-female-performer breakthroughs of the early 2010s. Woodley's specific contribution to the film — the willingness to play Alex's emotional development without the conventional teenage-female-character framing — is part of why the film's family-drama core operates at the level it does.