{"id":42827,"date":"2011-12-18T11:54:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-18T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=42827"},"modified":"2011-12-18T14:54:24","modified_gmt":"2011-12-18T19:54:24","slug":"movie-review-the-descendants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2011\/12\/18\/movie-review-the-descendants\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: The Descendants"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Children in American movies are typically superior to adults.\u00a0 The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent.\u00a0 \u201cHome Alone\u201d is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents.\u00a0 (An earlier post on children in films is\u00a0here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Descendants,\u201d the recent film with George Clooney (I saw it last night), starts more like a French film, where children are, well, children, and it\u2019s the parents who must endure and learn to cope with the kids\u2019 immaturity and thoughtlessness.<\/p>\n

Clooney is Matt King, and the name is a deliberate irony.\u00a0 Kinglike, he must decide the fate of a huge tract of pristine Kauai land that his family has owned for many generations.\u00a0 The money from the sale will make him and his many cousins and their families rich.\u00a0 Which developer will he sell the land to?\"\"<\/a>But as a husband and father he is far being monarch of all he surveys.\u00a0 His wife has been in an accident and lies in a coma.\u00a0 His two daughters are unapologetically impudent and insufferable.\u00a0 As the film starts, Scottie, age ten, has sent a nasty, obscene text to a classmate.\u00a0 Alex, seventeen, now at an expensive private rehab\/therapeutic school, first appears on screen drunk, having\u00a0 sneaked out of her room at night with another girl.\u00a0 Then there\u2019s Sid, Alex\u2019s friend, a slightly older boy, all stupidity and insensitivity, a chubby incarnation of Beavis and Butthead.\"\"<\/a>Then the film magically transforms the kids.\u00a0 Each has been introduced as obtuse, obscene, or obnoxious. But now Alex, it turns out, knows more than her father does, at least in one crucial area \u2013 that his wife, now on life support, had been cheating on him.<\/p>\n

The kids change from being French, a burden for the grown-up, to becoming almost classically American, not superior but equal.\u00a0 They are now his partners.\u00a0 Teens and adult are a team trying to discover the identity and location of the seducer so that King can confront him.\u00a0 The teenagers are suddenly much less difficult and much more helpful, while King sometimes appears uncertain and even silly, peering over hedges to spy on his wife\u2019s lover.\u00a0\u00a0 He asks his daughter for advice.\u00a0 He even asks Sid what he should do.\"\"<\/a>(You can get some sense of this transformation in the trailers\u00a0here<\/a> and\u00a0here<\/a>, which also outline the rest of the story.)<\/p>\n

Still, the movie doesn\u2019t go pure Hollywood.\u00a0 It does not present the world as a character contest where good faces evil, where the right action is clear and the only question is how the hero will come to make it.\u00a0 Instead, it shows a grown-up trying to understand and cope with problems and people he cannot really control.<\/p>\n

And nobody blows up a helicopter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog. Children in American movies are typically superior to adults.\u00a0 The kids are not only all right, they are wiser, less corrupt, and more competent.\u00a0 \u201cHome Alone\u201d is a classic example, where the plucky, resourceful kid triumphs over both the vindictiveness of the burglars and the mindlessness of his parents.\u00a0 (An earlier […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":258,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,15,272,343,1776,3920],"class_list":["post-42827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-culture","tag-marriagefamily","tag-tvmovies","tag-nation-france","tag-nation-united-states"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/258"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42827"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42833,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42827\/revisions\/42833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}