Despite the large, and talented, cast that Payne has assembled, The Descendants revolves entirely around its supremely amiable star. But, even with the crutch provided by an insistent voiceover, Clooney’s part is underwritten. Moreover, the actor’s own blessings are so evident that it’s hard to accept him as the beleaguered (if fabulously wealthy) everyman that the movie demands he be. With supporting characters called upon to react toward him or develop around him as necessary in a given situation, the narrative feels less like an unfolding novel than like an inflated short story. Slowly rolling downhill, The Descendants takes a turn or two but is basically always en route toward the reconciliation that’s a foregone conclusion.

The film offers little surprise and less character development.  We are told that Matt King (George Clooney) is a workaholic but there is absolutely NO evidence that’s true.  Even in the midst of a family crisis, like a spouse being serious injured and in a coma, a workaholic’s cell phone would keep ringing, his blackberry would keep updating, and his emails would continue to pour in.  King’s electronic devices are strangely silent.  Did the secretary at his busy law practice forget his phone number?  Did all his appointments get mysteriously cancelled? Did his clients suddenly have no crises of their own which need his attention?  We never see King wrestle with the urgency of two competing emergencies or have to battle where to put his attention– on the personal or professional.  He is totally focused on his immediate family situation with absolutely no outside interference.  This begs credibility for anyone who has ever been torn between a personal emergency and a demanding job.

King’s daughters allegedly don’t really know their dad (“I’m the back-up parent”).  Yet he immediately gathers his daughters to his side.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just leave them in boarding school, hire a nanny, or throw money or other resources at his kids if he were truly as disengaged as he is alleged to be?  He even puts up with a goofy social inept boyfriend as a travel companion to make the trip easier on his daughter.  There is some initial teen and tween snottiness over the course of the family road trip but King very quickly forms a warm and loving bond with his daughters.  Sure there is squabbling, bickering, and mocking but that is the nature of kids. It seems there is much more animosity and bitterness directed toward their comatose mom.  His older daughter is furious at her mother for cheating on King with a glad-handing over-eager real estate broker.  Immediately taking her father’s side in no way indicates she thinks her father is a jerk, a bad guy, or a lousy father.  This is the story of a preoccupied but relatively good dad who becomes a somewhat better dad.  Not a very dramatic character arc.

If a woman is going to cheat on the wealthy, charming, handsome King (he’s GEORGE CLOONEY) with a slightly dweeby somewhat desperate real estate broker  I want to know why.  Is she choosing a lesser man to embarrass or humiliate her husband, does her new lover put her husband to shame in some important respect, or is there some manipulative plot afoot having to do with the family land deal?  The affair is a mystery and just isn’t credible.  Her father does accuse King of being too cheap to buy his daughter her own boat but, again, we never see any evidence or action that indicates he is stingy in any of his dealings.  He doesn’t complain about the cost of bring the obnoxious boyfriend along.  He doesn’t scrimp on meals or anything having to do with the road trip.  The script tells us lots of things about various characters but never show us these characteristics in action.  Again, not the essence of compelling drama.

Then there is the land deal itself.  The King family came into their inheritance because of an interracial marriage between a great-great-grandfather and a Hawaiian princess.  This union had to be scandalous in its day.  Yet now, when interracial marriage is common in Hawaii and elsewhere, there isn’t a single Polynesian family member to be found.  What is with that?  If this is a film about family and if disposing of the family property gets so much screen time– why aren’t family cultural issues and differences at the heart of the dispute.  Any one who has a mixed family of any kind knows these kind of cultural differences surface under stress particularly when vast sums of money is involved.  Yet, even though King, has the deciding vote, his family is unusually passive and mellow when it comes down to the actual decision.  Little drama here and even less credibility.

Much has been made of the Hawaiian setting and the film’s sense of place.  Yet, given the white-bread nature of the family and lack of cultural specificity, I think the film could just as easily be set in Minnesota and the dispute be over acres of pristine lake front property.  Other than the lush landscape shots there is nothing in the story that makes it particularly Hawaiian.

I’ll close with a summation from Dana Stevens writing for Slate:

This is the setup for exactly the kind of story Payne does best: road movies about less-than-heroic oddballs on quests that are at once transformative and essentially ridiculous. I was so excited to see what he’d do with this misfit crew once he rounded them up and sent them on their journey. But The Descendants squanders the comic energy of its opening act. Once the Kings get to Kauai, Payne seems content to sit back and watch as the family pads around the spectacular shoreline, alternately squabbling and bonding. Matt eventually has a brief, awkward encounter with the man who made him a cuckold, and also a meeting with his barfly cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges), who has his own plans for that chunk of family property. Amid all this desultory beachcombing, Matt learns hard lessons about his wife, his daughters, and himself—but they’re lessons any discerning viewer already saw coming a mile away.

I found the film predictable, lacking in character development, with a script that continually tells us rather than shows us.  This is not a recipe for a Best Adapted Screenplay award.  Best Director perhaps, there some really engaging and tender moments in the performances, or Best Cinematography perhaps, the views are gorgeous– but in no way is this underwritten screenplay a Best in the writing category.

Two of the most talked about characters in Oscar-nominated pictures this year are emotionally damaged men deployed to handle bombs in people’s lives.  Their approaches to this assignment are very different.

In Up in the Air, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) uses platitudes and a smooth, calm, professional manner to defuse the explosive news that employees are being fired or laid off.  He travels through the gutted terrain of corporate America, ravaged by the financial down-turn and the corporate slash and burn policies of downsizing.

In The Hurt Locker, Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) uses a cocky, shoot-from-the-hip, iconoclastic style that is all his own to defuse roadside explosives hidden in sand, cars and the occasional corpse.  He travels through the gutted terrain of Iraq ravaged by war, poor planning policies and the smash and burn fury of insurgents.

Although equally emotionally closed, these two characters are very different.  This is an object lesson in the importance of understanding why a character does or refuses to do what he does.  Although neither man has close intimate family or personal relationships (and in fact both flee from them) these two men represent very different approaches to life and love.  The end result might be the same but their motivations and psychological profiles are very different.

Up in The Air – Power of Reason

Characters driven by the Power of Reason are most often the expert, technician, scientist or professional observer in a story.  They have an excellent grasp of details and often have terrific memories and great powers of recall.

In Up in The Air, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) is an expert at what he does— firing people.  He is a consummate professional, calm, skillful and dispassionately pleasant.

He displays an amazing ability to recall the contents of his subjects’ personnel files.  He surprises his colleague Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick) by remembering a person took cooking lessons earlier in his career and uses that information to terminate a highly charged interview successfully.

Power of Reason characters dominate a story situation by force of their special expertise, independent thinking, superior knowledge, keen analysis and cool self-containment.

Here Bingham displays his mastery of the airport security line:

Ryan Bingham: Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left. Bingo, Asians. They pack light, travel efficiently, and they have a thing for slip on shoes. Gotta love ’em.

Natalie Keener: That’s racist.

Ryan Bingham: I’m like my mother, I stereotype. It’s faster.

Power of Reason characters don’t believe in getting personally involved or emotionally entangled.  They always try to maintain a sense of professional distance.  They value their independence and their self-sufficiency above all else.

Here Bingham lectures on “How to Empty Your Backpack of Needless Relationships”:

Ryan Bingham: How much does your life weigh? Imagine for a second that you’re carrying a backpack. I want you to pack it with all the stuff that you have in your life… you start with the little things. The shelves, the drawers, the knickknacks, then you start adding larger stuff. Clothes, tabletop appliances, lamps, your TV… the backpack should be getting pretty heavy now. You go bigger. Your couch, your car, your home… I want you to stuff it all into that backpack. Now I want you to fill it with people. Start with casual acquaintances, friends of friends, folks around the office… and then you move into the people you trust with your most intimate secrets. Your brothers, your sisters, your children, your parents and finally your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, your girlfriend. You get them into that backpack, feel the weight of that bag. Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.

At the end of the movie, Bingham abandons his lecture and makes a leap of faith to connect emotionally and romantically with Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga), a woman he meets on the road.    She tells him early on that “she is him only female”.

Bingham falls for her, shows up at her door and has his heart crushed by this cool, detached and emotionally unavailable woman who strictly compartmentalizes her life.  She has a box for home and family as a busy working wife and mother and another box for her life on the road as an unattached high-powered female executive.  She coldly calls Bingham “a parenthesis” in her life.

Beneath their superior or distant exterior Power of Reason characters, like Ryan Bingham, are actually quite sensitive and deeply fear being overwhelmed emotionally.  These characters experience the rush and intensity of personal emotion as annihilating.  This response is the exact opposite of Power of Idealism character’s reaction.

The Hurt Locker – Power of Idealism

Characters driven by the Power of Idealism want to stand out from the crowd, to be extraordinary, unique and special.  They are rebels, iconoclasts, mavericks and artists of all kinds.

Power of Idealism characters are intense, passionate and rebellious. Everyone in the story immediately recognizes and acknowledges that their role is somehow heroic or “larger than than life.”  They don’t play by anyone else’s rules.

Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) in The Hurt Locker is a quintessential Power of Idealism character.  He is intense, cavalier and is moving swiftly toward becoming a legend.  In this exchange, his reputation grows:

Colonel Reed: You the guy in the flaming car, Sergeant James?

Staff Sergeant William James: Afternoon, sir. Uh, yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: Well, that’s just hot shit. You’re a wild man, you know that?

Staff Sergeant William James: Uh, yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: He’s a wild man. You know that? I want to shake your hand.

Staff Sergeant William James: Thank you, sir.

Colonel Reed: Yeah. How many bombs have you disarmed?

Staff Sergeant William James: Uh, I’m not quite sure.

Colonel Reed: Segeant?

Staff Sergeant William James: Yes, sir.

Colonel Reed: I asked you a question.

Staff Sergeant William James: Eight hundred seventy-three, sir.

Colonel Reed: Eight hundred! And seventy-three. Eight hundred! And seventy-three. That’s just hot shit. Eight hundred and seventy-three.

Staff Sergeant William James: Counting today, sir, yes.

Colonel Reed: That’s gotta be a record. What’s the best way to… go about disarming one of these things?

Staff Sergeant William James: The way you don’t die, sir.

Colonel Reed: That’s a good one. That’s spoken like a wild man. That’s good.

A. O. Scott, writing for the New York Times describes James like this:  “Staff Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner) is something else, someone we recognize instantly even if we have never seen anyone quite like him before. He is a connoisseur, a genius, an artist.”

The artistic temperament— and the yearning or longing for or to be “something more extraordinary” creates a white hot intensity of feeling in these characters.  In contrast, long-term relationships and the comfortable companionship that committed loving couples (and families) share seem suffocatingly pedestrian.

Power of Idealism characters, operating in their Dark Side, are unprepared to make the ordinary, small, everyday sacrifices real long-term every-day love requires, especially when there are children involved.

In this exchange James explains to his infant son:

Staff Sergeant William James: You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

James’ character reminds me of another Power of Idealism character addicted to the drug of violence, the Narrator (Edward Norton) in Fight Club.  He feels dead in his ordinary every-day life and must witness extreme pain in support groups to find release, catharsis and peaceful sleep.  Soon, even that isn’t enough.

The Narrator (with disgust):  “This chick Marla Singer did not have testicular cancer. She was a liar. She had no diseases at all. I had seen her at Free and Clear my blood parasite group Thursdays. Then at Hope, my bi-monthly sickle cell circle. And again at Seize the Day, my tuberculous Friday night. Marla… the big tourist. Her lie reflected my lie. Suddenly I felt nothing. I couldn’t cry, so once again I couldn’t sleep.”

He must then inflict pain on himself and others, through brutal beatings in Fight Club in order to feel anything or even seem alive.  However horrific, this violence has an intensity he finds satisfying.  Better to feel this than nothing at all.

In Trainspotting, Power of Idealism character, Renton (Ewan McGregor), recounts his Dark Side experience with heroin.  The drug’s effects are also intense but horrific.  The adrenalin rush of  Staff Sergeant James’ work seems much like Renton describes heroin:  “Take the best orgasm you’ve ever had… multiply it by a thousand, and you’re still nowhere near it.”

Kenneth Turan sums up this feeling writing about The Hurt Locker in The Los Angeles Times:  “The film starts with a celebrated quote from the book War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” It’s easy to understand this thought intellectually, but by the time this remarkable film (The Hurt Locker) comes to an end, we feel it in our souls.”

Power of Reason characters withdraw from the intimacy of love and family because they are afraid they will feel too much.  Power of Idealism characters withdraw from the intimacy of love and family because they are afraid they won’t feel enough.