The Descendants
(Starring George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller)
There is a miraculous, gentle balance to The Descendants. It's a film about a family whose mother is in a coma, dying, but the script avoids being maudlin. Moments of quiet, humane comedy compliment the grief. The characters of The Descendants have inherited much of Hawaii's monastic land, but the flick also remains reverent without feeling trapped by the island's history. This delicate little dramedy should rack up some serious nominations in a couple months.
Clooney portrays a workaholic dad; he calls himself the â┚¬Å”back-up parent.â┚¬Â When his wife is hit by a boat and hooked to ventilators, he has to wrangle his daughters. One is the beautiful, spirited juvenile delinquent Woodley (The Secret Life of an American Teen) on the cusp of adulthood. The other is a weird 10-year-old Miller. In the middle of grief, Clooney must also act as trustee for a huge swath of untouched tropical wilderness. It's a valuable land package that Hawaiian law and his family are pushing him to sell, to be developed, worth millions.
Oh, and I don't think it's a surprise (because it's in the trailer and commercials), but Woodley tells Dad that Mom was cheating on him. There's thatâ┚¬Â¦because, gee, Dad doesn't quite have enough on his plate already!
Clooney plays it all with an extraordinarily subtle insanity. He's not one to get mad, make a scene. Even as he tries, he fails. He bumbles through complex emotions. His daughter pushes her distant parent to connect; this little hoodlum will do anything to â┚¬Å”help.â┚¬ÂÂ
â┚¬Å”What am I supposed to do here? I mean, what would you do if you were me?â┚¬Â Clooney asks. Unfortunatelyâ┚¬â€Âas a perfect example of his bad parentingâ┚¬â€Âhe asks his daughter's 16-year-old stoner boyfriend.
I cannot say enough about the sly humor injected by artful director/writer Alexander Payne. It's the same balance of comedy and truth that he brought to Election, Sideways, and About Schmidt. Payne isn't afraid of the close-up, even as characters are lost, whole landscapes of emotions flying across their faces. When these moments of honesty hit, they feel intimate and deep.
In this thoughtful story, Clooney and Woodley are resplendent, and so is the setting. For lovers of cozy family stories, this is paradise.
Hugo
(Starring Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Jude Law)
Hugo (Butterfield) is an orphan, living in the walls of the Paris railway station, sometime in the 1920s. He maintains the clocks, a task taught to him by his tinkerer father Law. When Dad dies, all Hugo has left is a wind-up automaton, a robot toy that the boy believes, when fixed, will send him a message from his Heaven. Instead, it seems to tell Hugo more about an old toymaker (Kingsley) who works in the train station, haunted by his past. Only the old toy man's goddaughter Moretz (Kick-Ass) can help Hugo solve the mystery, an enigma linked to the very beginnings of filmmaking as entertainment, art and magic.
The setting is rich and intriguing, and each shot is carefully composed, lovely to look at. In fact, finally, new 3D technology is used throughout a film to enrich the entire viewing experience instead of as a quick, thrilling gimmick.
Interspersed in Hugo's romantic musings on film are other love stories. They feature well-loved actors like stationmaster Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat), Emily Mortimer (Lovely and Amazing) and Richard Griffiths (the Harry Potter series). There's even an old man (Star Wars Christopher Lee) who loves books. It all sounds scattered, but one can sense that Scorsese is orchestrating all his own great loves into one story.
