I have mentioned quite a bit about the importance about who is in the audience when you watch a film and how they can either make it or break it. I also pointed towards the "unwritten rules" of the cinema that we should all follow (it's just common sense really, not an actual list of rules.) Today, when watching The Descendants, I encountered someone breaking the unwritten rule #313 (and recently added due to modern technology) - do not go on your freakin' iPAD during a film in the cinema.
I mean if a small lit up phone screen wasn't distracting enough for everyone around you, imagine how distracting a bloody iPad screen is...
Apart from that complete lack of sense and complete stupidity from one man in the audience, I actually kind of enjoyed The Descendants (but not in such a way that I would rush out and see it again or buy the DVD.)
It's another kind of slow burner - a Father, Matt King (George Clooney) is looking after his wife while she is in a coma after being in an unfortunate boating accident. While he is doing this, he must reconnect with his two daughters, Scottie King (Amara Miller) and Alexandra King (Shailene Woodley) before being dropped the bombshell that his wife will never wake up from her coma. What follows is a moving portrayal of how a Father comes to terms with the loss of his wife, telling his children the news, finding out about his wife's shady past and also dealing with a big landowner deal that could make or break his family's finances.
To be honest, the landowner deal is kind of put to the back burner, as this film largely deals with the family conflicts and fallouts between Matt King and his two daughters, while their Mother and Wife deteriorates on the hospital bed in front of them.
My couple of criticisms of the film are that it is actually a bit slow. As I've said before, I'm a bit of a fan of slow-burning films, but this one could have easily had about 20 minutes to half an hour cut out and still be a pretty decent film.
Secondly, the film suffers from a couple of awkward acting moments, where the actors look a bit unsure of how to use the material that they had been given. While the film is largely very good at balancing the heavy emotional stuff with moments of comic relief, there are some moments where you are unsure whether to laugh or cry at how pathetically hopeless the situation is that the characters are facing. Like the moment when King starts shouting at his wife (who is in a coma) and starts demanding a response from her - I get that it was showing how desperate he is to find out the reasons for her shady past, but the editing choices to cut back to her face (looking like death) provided moments of comedy in a scene that should have been played purely for emotion.
However, the film overcomes these slight issues and draws in it's audience through tugging on their heart strings. When the youngest daughter, Scottie finds out the truth about how her Mother is actually dying, it's played through a silent montage of the Doctor telling her (rather than her Father telling her) with some beautiful Hawaiian music playing in the background. She tears up, the audience tears up... the film has done it's job that it set out to do.
Also, the backdrop setting of Hawaii was perfect for a film that dealt with such a heavy subject matter of death and saying "Goodbye" to someone that we love. It goes to show that outward appearances are not everything and that darkness can be just around the corner wherever we live, even if we do live in "paradise".
As Clooney says in the opening narrative, "Just because we live in Hawaii, people think we live in paradise... Paradise can go f*ck itself."
*** / *****
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