Congratulations Alexander Payne

Dynasty, Hawaiian Style

ROBERT ZALLER

The Greek-American director Alexander Payne (né Papadopoulos) has made a string of films that examine contemporary America with a merrily jaundiced eye. In Citizen Ruth, he concocted unlikely hilarity out of the story of an unwed girl seeking an abortion. In Election, he used high school culture to send up our adult political mores. In Sideways, he turned the road movie into a scalpel that dissected male bonding and alienation. This latter-day Preston Sturges, now 50, mocks with the best of humor, and masks a tragedian’s impulse in a satirist’s wit.

Payne’s new film, The Descendants, begins like Citizen Ruth with a premise that’s anything but funny: A woman is thrown by a boating accident into an irreversible coma. We see the woman, Elizabeth, water-skiing off Waikiki beach before the opening credits roll, her face ecstatic with pleasure. It’s all the direct information we ever get about her, because she’s otherwise immobile in her hospital bed, or slowly curling up to die after her tubes are unplugged. 

What we do learn from others is that she’s smart, willful, spoiled and dissatisfied— above all with her husband Matt (George Clooney), who’s plodding and stingy by her standards, especially since he’s descended from colonial-era Hawaiian royalty and sits on a fortune as the sole trustee of one of the islands’ last great private estates. 

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