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On Movies: 'Descendants' handles trouble in paradise with wit and Clooney

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 22, 2011 - My first reaction to "The Descendants" was, more or less, "Jeepers, I'd sure like to live in Hawaii." That came to mind despite George Clooney's brief voiceover admonition that the sunny island has the same problems of poverty and crime and homelessness as the other 49 states.

Having dispensed with political correctness in about 45 seconds, Clooney proceeds to spend the rest of the engagingly bittersweet movie enveloped by the Sweet Life. The affable star puddle-jumps from gorgeous island to even more gorgeous island, trying to solve personal and family problems -- some of them, admittedly, quite serious. There's trouble in paradise, but it should not go unnoticed that Clooney confronts it sockless in shorts and loafers, cruising around in a sun-splashed silver Mercedes.

Director Alexander Payne ("Sideways") is very good at showing us the comedy inherent in everyday life, even the deadly serious parts of it, and Clooney has demonstrated talents in that regard as well.

The actor plays the aptly named Matt King, a busy real estate lawyer who is the trustee of an unspoiled 25,000-acre oceanside estate that has been in his family for 150 years. A developer with visions of ranch houses and condos and shopping malls as far as the eye can see has made a hard-to-resist offer for the land, and King is under considerable pressure from his layabout cousins to sell it and make everyone filthy rich.

Then King's wife (Patricia Hastie) has a terrible waterskiing accident and ends up in a deep coma in intensive care, not expected to recover. King, we gather, has neglected his family for business, and he suddenly has to make life-or-death decisions concerning his wife and take care of his two daughters, a confused 10-year-old (Amara Miller) and a teenager (Shailene Woodley) who is almost incapacitated with anger at her parents - her father because he is never around, her mother for a reason that King soon uncovers: Mrs. King was having an affair.

To add to the stress, his teenage daughter comes practically joined at the hip to a laconic, dope-smoking slacker named Sid (Nick Krause), who, upon being introduced to his girlfriend's father, hugs the man and calls him "Bro!" Clooney tells the kid, "Don't you ever do that again." I laughed; but, for the only time in the movie, which defies predictability at almost every turn, I felt like I was being set up. Sid, I was certain, was eventually going to surprise Matt King.

Director Payne, who adapted "The Descendants" from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, keeps the story moving at an enjoyable (and climate appropriate) lope as Matt King goes searching for his wife's lover, deals with his rebellious daughters (and Sid), and tries to figure out what he's going to do about offers for the pristine lay of inherited land whose ownership goes back to the family of the fabled Kamehameha, first king of Hawaii. The movie is beautifully acted by all the featured cast: Robert Forster does a wonderful turn as Matt's gruff father-in-law, and Beau Bridges is priceless as a cousin whose loud flowered shirts and stoned demeanor mask a truly calculating man.

Opens Wednesday Nov. 23

'Revenge of the Electric Car'

Documentary filmmaker Chris Paine, who excoriated Detroit in 2006 with "Who Killed the Electric Car?" - big automobile and oil companies, that's who - returns to the subject with the much more hopeful "Revenge of the Electric Car." He follows four men: executives at Nissan, General Motors and Tesla, the electric-car startup, plus a do-it-yourselfer who puts electric engines in existing cars.

All of them are enthusiastic about the future of electric automobiles, with the price of gasoline rising and the cost of batteries falling, and Paine picks up on their enthusiasm. The documentary is often interesting, but Paine gives us too much detail on the lives and thoughts of the human protagonists and too little detail on the cars themselves. Sometimes, he seems to be glossing over crucial information - for example, he doesn't always distinguish between hybrids (like the Chevy Volt) that are mainly dependent on gasoline engines and true electric-powered cars.

Opens Wednesday Nov. 23

Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, is a special contributor to the Beacon. 

Harper Barnes
Harper Barnes' most recent book is Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement