Dissecting A(nother) Scene From The Descendants

It is a scene I have referenced in other reviews and essays, a scene I have so frequently referenced because I can recall no scene in recent cinema (or the visual arts in general) that so quickly, precisely, emphatically, and brilliantly demonstrates the makeup of a family and how its members can be strikingly alike and different and loving and resentful at once. Truly, it is astonishing. Here’s why…

Matt (George Clooney), Alex (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) enter the hospital to visit, respectively, their wife and mother. This is Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie). In the wake of the opening scene – a glimpse of Elizabeth perched on the back of a motorboat in Honolulu Bay – she has been left in a coma, her life support machine turned off. Matt, his appearance harried, politely asks the girls to wait in the hall. He'd like a moment with their Mom alone. They oblige. He enters his wife's room, closes the door and pulls the curtain behind and just in front of the door shut. He turns to his wife. He has a few things to say. He commences.

Matt: "You were gonna ask me for a divorce so you could be with some fucking fuckhead, Brian Speer? Are you kidding me? Who are you? The only thing I know for sure is you're a goddamn liar."

I’ve talked about the film’s brilliant employment of cursing (as in, people aren’t just cursing for the sake of cursing) before, but this just another example of it – how Matt routinely curses and then can’t quite figure out why his daughters routinely curse.

Matt: "So what do you have to say for yourself? Make a little joke? Tell me that I got it all wrong." Now he leans in close, really close. She looms in the forefront of her shot. "Tell me again that I'm too out of touch with my own feelings and I need to go to therapy. Isn't the idea of marriage to make your partner's way in life a little easier? For me, it was always harder with you, and you're still making it harder. Now you're on that ventilator and fucking up my life. You are relentless. You know I was going to ask you for a divorce someday."

Very rarely in this film is Matt actually afforded ethical high ground. He is not the most compassionate person. This is not to say he is a mean-spirited person – he’s not – but merely person with a few glaring and problematic flaws (humans, I think they call them). He is not a doting father – and admits it – and had become less than an attentive husband – and admits it – and, yet, while there are understandable reasons for his spouse wanting to take solace in an affair it’s still, you know, an affair. But even then Matt can’t leave his old ways behind, can’t stop being a selfish jerk, can’t stop being an immature jerk.

Immaturity. It’s a pall cast over the entire King family. This is not, however, the immaturity of Team Apatow, video games and bong hits and such. This is the immaturity skulking about within any mature adult, how even a successful real estate lawyer and descendant of Hawaiian royalty suffers in part from emotional stuntment. Which is what makes it so perfect when he picks up and hurls across the room his wife’s teddy bear – put on display, I suspect, to render good tidings – and dismissively declares “Daddy’s little girl”, both an item and a term meant to evoke……immaturity.

Now Matt lets his daughters in the room. Scottie is eager. Alex is reluctant, maybe even angry. "Hi, mom," she finally says, "sorry for being bad." Oh. Well. Maybe not angry? Maybe forgiving? She continues: "Sorry for wasting your money on private expensive schools when you could have been using it on facials and massages and sports equipment." Nope. She's angry. And not forgiving. Her voice rises. "And sorry we weren't good enough for you. Especially Dad." Matt: "Stop it. That's outta line."

Alex: "What?! Are you gonna ground me?! Are you gonna ship me off to another boarding school?! Give me a time out?!" 
Matt grabs her. Spanks her (yes, actually spanks her, though rather reluctantly.)
Matt: "Goddamn it."

So…the husband just spent his face-to-face time with his wife telling her off. Now the oldest daughter is spending her face-to-face time with her mom telling her off. As in, the oldest daughter possesses the father’s own attributes, and the father scolds her for it while failing to realize his own failure to set an example.

Scottie: "You got served!" 
Matt: "Scottie, go wait in the hall." 
Scottie: "She's the one who's outta line." 
Matt: "Go find Sid." 
Scottie: "He's smoking! I shouldn't be around secondhand smoke." 

Ah, and so too does Alex’s failure to set an example for Scottie result in Scottie’s confrontational attitude and immaturity. (Father → Oldest Daughter → Youngest Daughter.)

Alex: "Did you just spank me?" 
Matt: "You have no right to talk to you mother that way.” But he, of course, does. “She's going to die in a few days. Those could be your last words." 
Alex: "I have every right to speak that way to her. I'm angry at her. How can you be so forgiving?"
Matt: "I'll be angry later. Right now let's just think about the good parts.” Which, of course, he has not been thinking of. “And don't say that stuff in front of your sister. Say something different."

Alex weighs her Dad's "order."

Alex: "Look, Mom, I know that we fought. I always wanted to be like you. I am like you. I'm exactly like you." 

In a film filled with masterstrokes, this one is the most masterly. I wish I could convey in my archaic blogging verbiage how Woodley communicates that last line – begrudgingly, admiringly. “I’m EXACTLY like you.” Alex’s mother/Matt’s wife never speaks in the film. Not once. It’s brave to have so many characters talk about another character without giving the targeted character an opportunity to respond. There are critics who would argue this choice actually constitutes the exact opposite of bravery. But the more I consider “The Descendants”, the more I realize this viewpoint is entirely wrong. Alex may be angry at her mother but she is her mother’s daughter. And so, in a very real way, Elizabeth is present and speaking the entire movie, she’s just present and speaking through Alex.

In the confrontations father and daughter have you can catch a glimmer of the confrontations husband and wife must have had. At the same time, you can catch a glimmer of what two combustible personas can do when they align – such as in those moments when father and daughter unite to act as amateur detectives to find and confront that fucking fuckhead Brian Speer.

Matt: "You are like her. Mostly, I guess. Maybe in some bad ways. Remains to be seen." 

You wonder, don’t you? You wonder if Alex will take heed from the examples her mother and father failed to set. But then you wonder some more, and as you do you can almost make out a mental image of a futuristic Alex riding recklessly on the back of a motorboat in choppy waves with a smile on her face and the wind in her hair. Remains to be seen.

The Descendants: Dissecting A Scene Through Dialogue

Matt King (George Clooney), his daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) and her “friend” Syd (Nick Krause) have just left the home of the parents of Matt’s wife, Elizabeth, who is currently in a coma, the same wife he has just learned had been cheating on him with local real estate agent Brian Speer. Syd, sort of like a 2 watt bulb, had mostly unintentionally insulted the dementia-addled wife of Elizabeth’s father. This resulted in her husband (Robert Forster) punching Syd in the face. Syd rides in the backseat of Matt’s car, an icebag pressed to his bruised eye, with Alex.

Syd: "How often do old people haul off and just fucking cold cock you?"
Matt: "He's hit me a few times over the years. And watch your language."

There is more than just a bit of swearing in “The Descendants.” The swearing, in fact, would be the singular reason why it was saddled with an “R” rating. But where the majority of swearing in American movies has no rhyme or reason and it just numbs the mind and leaves the audience de-sensitized, the frequent swearing in “The Descendants” has a clever and almost subtle higher purpose. To wit…

Alex: "Can I see it?” (She pulls the icebag off Syd’s eye to reveal the black and blue wound.) “Holy shit."

2.5 seconds after Matt has just decreed “Watch your language”, his daughter completely ignores her father’s decree and uses bad language.

Matt: "Can you two just cool it when you're around me? Stop touching each other?"
Syd: "Woah, man. Maybe that's why you're wife cheated on you, if you're so against touching."

- Matt brings his car to a furious halt, turns and wags his finger in Syd’s face.

Matt: "You little fuck. Do you get hit a lot?"

This happens again and again. Matt admonishing his children to watch their language only to utterly fail to heed his own admonishment. There is even an occasion when he employs bad language and one daughter or the other immediately afterwards employs bad language and then he admonishes them for employing bad language. What opens up wider and wider on repeated viewings is how carefully drawn “The Descendants” is to show how traits – whether for good or bad - have been passed down in this family.

Syd: "I've had my share."
Matt (to Alex): "Your friend is completely retarded."
Syd: "Hey, my little brother is retarded. Don't use that word in a derogatory fashion."
Matt: "Oh."

This is also a film about immaturity. Sure, Matt may be lawyer and a Hawaiian land baron but the film never hides how ill-equipped he is to be thrust into the position of caring for his daughters all on his own and never shies away from displaying his infantile rages. Like this one. Choosing to call his daughter’s friend “retarded” as a means to insult is the sort of choice a second-grader on the playground might make, and Syd immediately calling him out knocks him back. His “oh” seems to be one not just of shock but resignation to the sin he has just committed. Then again…

Syd: "Psyche. I don't have a retarded brother."
Alex: "Syd, you suck!"
Syd: "Speaking of retarded, do you ever wish that retarded people or old people would just hurry up? Sometimes I'm waiting for them to cross the street and I'm like, come on already."

So yeah, Syd is just as immature as Matt, but even as Syd carries on the camera focuses in on Matt, disheveled, breathing heavily, maybe coming to grips with his own weakness. It has all the markings of a possibly poignant moment, and even more so when Alex ignores Syd and leans forward toward her Dad as we expect a father/daughter talk full of hard-won platitudes. Instead…

Alex: "Dad, don't forget that I know where he lives."

As in, Brian Speer. She knows where the guy who was cheating on her dad’s wife lives. They can go find him. Stalk him. Have it out with him. But perhaps Matt will for once reject the infantile and accept the mature. Perhaps he will have a moment of enlightenment.

Matt: "Get in the front seat."

Or perhaps not.