Alexander Payne's "The Descendants'

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.

Unfaithful, but dead

Matt himself, suddenly thrust into the self-described role of "backup parent" to his two daughters, must get acquainted with what has notionally been his life. What he discovers from his stoner daughter Scottie (Shailene Woodley) is that Elizabeth has been having an affair. Matt reacts by taking off at a dead run for a neighboring friend who, as he suspects, will know the identity of the lover in question.

But what to do next? Death cancels all debts, even those of the heart; Matt can't upbraid his wife, and revenging himself seems petty and futile. Besides, he has a lot on his plate: In addition to dealing with a dysfunctional family, Matt must decide between competing bids for the family estate, which must be sold before it reverts to the public domain.

Matt decides to use fairness as an excuse for tracking down his rival, who as he suspects knows nothing about Elizabeth's condition and might thus wish to say goodbye to her himself. Will Matt even bond with him, as Marlon Brando's character does with his deceased wife's lover in Last Tango in Paris? Matt's not that generous (or masochistic), but he knows he will find out how serious the affair was— and therefore the depth of his wife's betrayal— by gauging the reaction he gets.

Not quite paradise

What Matt incidentally discovers, though, is that the lover has a stake in the company whose bid for the estate Matt has decided to accept. Love and money— the plot suddenly becomes tricky, since Matt's large extended family is waiting eagerly on the sale.

Hawaii, as Matt tells us in a voice-over at the beginning of the film, isn't the paradise it's cracked up to be: People get sick here, they suffer and die, sometimes they have fatal accidents. But it's still the westernmost outpost of the American dream, and some of its natural beauty remains unsullied. What obligation do the stewards of the land have toward it?

Matt is proud of his family tree and conscious of his dynastic responsibilities, but he knows he's done nothing to earn the decision that's his to make. What constitutes a faithful steward? How shall we live with the earth that is ours to dispose of but that also sustains us? That is the long focus Payne offers us in what is otherwise a convoluted domestic comedy.

In the film's most crucial scene, Matt stands with his daughters on a bluff above the family acres, looking across a long green sweep to the headland that tugs the coast into the sea. Payne's camera invites you to linger, and then to imagine the scene filled in with look-alike hotels and bungalows, malls and casinos.

Is this the best we can do with the planet? Is it the best we can ask of Matt, or he of himself? Impure as Matt's motives may be, tinged as they are by jealousy, grief and rage, and unworthy as he may feel of his authority, the decision is still his.

Smirking boy friend

This could easily be material for melodrama or moral preachment. It's much harder to make comedy of it, but Payne's sense of the ridiculous grounds the proceedings in wit. Satire is the trickiest of mediums: A little too much seems heartless, but sentiment will kill it. I can't say Payne walks a perfect line here; there's a bit too much redemption on offer for my taste.

A minor but telling example is the character of Sidney (Nick Krause), Scottie's boorish boy friend, who, featuring the broadest screen smirk since Jan-Michael Vincent, intrudes himself on the family's grief, mocks a dementia victim and generally disports himself as the lord of the universe. You want to punch him out, and one character actually does.

But as the film progresses, Sidney somehow becomes almost mannerly, even Matt's ally of sorts. It's not a matter of character development; the plot simply needs to make him more sympathetic. This won't do, but it's the sort of thing that can happen when satire veers toward drama. Billy Wilder would know how to handle this, but Payne hasn't fully mastered the conflicting impulses of his art, and credibility here is lost.

What holds the film together is George Clooney's Matt. Matt's moral instruction is its central point, and through his eyes we see everyone else.

A less noble Clooney

Matt isn't so noble that he does the right thing for uncompromised reasons, but he's the more human for that, and thankfully so. It isn't even entirely clear that he can ultimately do the right thing, for the not invalid claims of others stand in his way, and in the long run paradise is sure to be overrun.

Matt warns us that suffering and death are all around us, no matter how bucolic the setting; he should add that greed and corruption are no less bred in the bone. Comic resolution may be permitted the satirist, but happy endings are not.

I wondered if the film would have a last scene after Elizabeth's ashes are scattered. It does, and it's just too pat and comforting. The Descendants is in many ways Alexander Payne's most ambitious film. But it's also in some ways his most flawed.