(Dir. Alexander Payne Starring: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause)
Hawaii, no matter how you try to frame it, is a beautiful place.
I also really liked George Clooney in this. And yes, apparently he ‘put on weight’ for the role and all that jazz, but I didn’t see any of that.
What I did and was pleased to see was a father and husband struggling to wrap his head around the potential loss of his wife (she’s in a coma). He makes no jokes about it, they were on the verge of divorce before she had her coma-inducing accident, and this new situation is incredibly difficult-how are you supposed to feel when someone you were falling in hate with gets hurt? Those former lovey-dovey feelings can’t just vanish in an instant.
(Ok, ok, he didn’t hate her, but they really weren’t in a good place, so sue me)
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| He also grew a grass-tache (geddit?). |
What I really didn’t need to see or even attempt to believe was the idea of this mildly tanned white guy being of Hawaiian Royal Descent. Uh huh. You...you really want to go there? I understand that the islands of Hawaii, like many, many others, were colonised and that white people were able to assimilate into their culture (not always in a peaceful way-I’m looking at you, Captain Cook), but really? Really. Really. No. The lineage was explained in the film in a pretty cohesive way, but in my opinion, could have been cut out entirely to make way for the estranged daughters instead.
Alexandra (Woodley) and Scottie (Miller) are Matt King’s (Clooney + oh my god that last name...I’m actually shaking my head right now) wayward daughters, both young teenagers, both wary of their father. Alexandra seems to have been shipped off to some other island boarding school and Scottie, who lives at home, apparently has never talked to her father ever in her life (and vice versa). So what better time to rekindle a father-daughter relationship than when your mother is brain dead? Perfect.
In all seriousness, the progression between the three Kings is very sweet and good natured. A scene that really stuck with me is when Scottie and Matt go to pick up Alexandra from her school to bring her to visit her mother in the hospital. Alexandra is caught off school property drinking, and without saying anything, we can tell that Matt believes this is an ongoing problem with his daughter. No, she defends herself, he just really doesn’t know her. Any other night, and she would have been in her room studying, or doing homework, or just hanging out with her friends. Like all actual teenagers tend to experience in life, he just happened to catch her at a bad time to make first impressions. And throughout the rest of the film, Alexandra lives up to this standard-wise beyond her years, a relatively sensible, yet still precocious teenager who has never really gotten along with her parents. And it’s perfect, something I definitely want to see more of in films.
When it is declared by the doctor that the comatose mother isn’t going to come out of this alive, Matt and Scottie and Alexandra-joined by her boyfriend Sid (Krause-even Sid is a pretty rational, if not somewhat stupid teenage boy-realism!), make the rounds to tell all of their family relations the sad news. Matt is in turn caught by surprise when Alexandra reveals how Coma Mum was actually an adulterer. Uh oh. So the four go on a quest to find out who this mystery man is, so they can get some catharsis out of telling him that his part-time lover is in the hospital dying.
And honestly, isn’t this enough of a film? The journey these four go on to accept that their mother is going to die, realise that they indeed have a father, that they are still a family. Not the family they once were, but a new family, evolving with these horrendous events in their lives, each of them with their own unique personalities that once clashed, but now mesh together. Not perfectly, but the way a family does.
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| Beach swag. |
The whole B-Plot about selling off a piece of prime land to resort developers? Not even needed. Sure, it helped display some emotional development for Matt, but it was too obvious a device, almost-director Payne should have really trusted his audience (and Clooney) enough to allow us to see Matt’s revelation ourselves, and not have to rely on this oh-so-metaphorical storyline to tell his story.
I really liked this film, Clooney wasn’t being Clooney, the teenagers were spot on, and it was just very, very sweet.
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