The Descendants

In preparation for my first trip to Hawaii in nearly a year I popped a copy of The Descendants into the DVD player.

George Clooney plays Matt King, the descendant of missionaries and the executor of a trust that makes him and all his distant cousins very land- but not cash-rich. The events on Oahu and Kauai take place in the span of a few weeks, when multiple family and business crises beset the protagonist.

The Clooney character makes flawed but perfectly understandable decisions: we are often laughing with him, at him, and his dually comic and tragic circumstances. The other characters are richly drawn in a few strokes, but none of them are as bad, stupid, or selfish as they initially appear. I enjoyed the movie very much.

One quibble: panoramic sweeps of high-rise Honolulu notwithstanding, the slice of Hawaii depicted in 2011 looks like the Hawaii of 1951. By that I mean Matt King does business with and socializes only with Caucasians. True, he is a member of the haole upper crust, but the “Big Five” companies that were founded by missionary children no longer control the Islands. In the Hawaii of the 21st century Asians, Hawaiians, and other Pacific Islanders, as well as out-of-State investors, are also represented in the councils of power. The poshest country clubs are rainbow, not chalky white.

James Michener ended his 1956 epic, Hawaii, with the rise to prominence of the Golden Man. In the Descendants the Golden Man does not yet exist.

A second, minor quibble: Matt King and his wife are having marital problems, and early in the movie we discover that his wife is the one who has been having an affair. An amicable land baron with movie-star good looks is the wronged spouse? Get real.