The 84th annual Academy Awards ceremony will take place Feb. 26, 2012, and that means one very important, exciting thing: the best movies of the year are beginning to trickle their way into theaters.
I recently saw “The Descendants” recently and can say with quite certainty that it is easily the best movie I have seen so far this year. Although this year has been kind of slow with movie quality of any kind, considering the tough contenders of films such as “Breaking Dawn: Part 1″ and “Bad Teacher,” I feel that “The Descendants” will surpass movies even coming out this Academy Award season.
Lawyer Matt King (George Clooney), the hopeless and quite clueless father, spends most of this movie attempting to build relationships with his two daughters: the rebellious teenager, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and her younger sister, Scottie (Amara Miller). The hardest part of this process is easily the fact that his wife was in a horrific boating accident, and he receives the news that her condition is steadily deteriorating. What could be harder than that? While his wife is on life support, Matt discovers that she had been cheating on him prior to her accident.
Throughout the movie, Matt has a large business deal going on that has the potential to change his life, as well as many other inhabitants of Hawaii, which happens to be the beautiful location where this movie takes place. He has the extraordinarily difficult task of confronting his wife’s family and friends about her condition, while simultaneously dealing with the pressure knowing there is another man out there that his wife had feelings for that may not be aware of what has happened. Matt struggles with these conflicts throughout the movie, bringing his daughters (and Alex’s simpleminded friend Sid) along every step of the way.
If you are familiar with writer and director Alexander Payne’s work, many of the dynamics of this movie should not fool you. He takes the idea of a seemingly simple family dealing with tragedy and plays it perfectly, making sure to not to make the situation seem overdone, which could have been very easy to do considering the circumstances. George Clooney’s performance was phenomenal, but I was actually more blown away by that of Shailene Woodley. Considering the fact that she was coming from the ABC Family TV show “Secret Life of an American Teenager,” I did not expect that a character she played would have such a huge impact on the way I felt about a movie: she absolutely stole the show.
This brilliant movie would, like Payne’s previous movie Sideways, be considered a “dramedy,” using elements from both the drama and comedy genres to make a movie that will definitely stand out among others. Be prepared: you will need Kleenex. There was not a dry eye in the house as the audience travels along this family’s emotional rollercoaster.
