Alexander Payne's The Descendants has just about everything you need for a male midlife-crisis movie, and more: A big plot of unspoiled family land about to be sold off to developers, sullen teenagers, a wife in a coma. Payne, in his first full-length feature since the 2004 Sideways, pulls out all the stops, including casting George Clooney, an actor who's aging beautifully but who nonetheless, thankfully, has allowed himself to look his age.
In Payne's vision, all of these elements were probably supposed to add up to a picture of utmost honesty. Instead, The Descendants is an ultra-polished picture in which every emotion we're supposed to feel has been cued up well in advance. There's nothing surprising or affecting about it, and not even Clooney, who works wonders with the occasional piece of dialogue, can save it.
Clooney plays Matt King, a well-off lawyer living in Hawaii, where generations of his family have thrived. In the movie's early minutes, he lays everything out for us in voiceover: He and his cousins are about to have a pow-wow over a vast stretch of unspoiled land that's been in the family for more than 100 years -- they've decided it's time to sell. That's plenty for any one guy's plate, but we also learn that Matt's wife has been lying unconscious for 23 days after a boating accident. Matt comes clean with the fact that he hasn't been a great husband or father, and though his precocious preteen daughter (Amara Miller) seems to be pretty well-adjusted, her 17-year-old sister (Shailene Woodley) is a pouty sort with lots of mommy issues. Together, along with the older girl's stoner pal (Nick Krause), the family sets out on a journey of reconnection and healing, supposedly ameliorated by Payne-style ironic wisecracks.
That's the thing about Payne: In pictures like Sideways and About Schmidt, he's gotten away with the junkiest kind of sentimentality by packing deadpan gags around it, like ice around a dead fish. Payne adapted the movie, with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. But if he has any real feeling for these characters, he doesn't let it show. There are lots of conveniently judgmental assessments made about adulterers; teenagers who have no clue about how complicated life really is are allowed to call the shots; grown-ups who pay lip service to the fact that they've made mistakes are absolved in the blink of an eye because, well, they're being played by George Clooney making moo-moo eyes.
Clooney does have a few good moments, and his carriage, in particular, is something to watch: His arms dangle awkwardly from his short-sleeved patterned shirts; he walks with an easy, loping gait that isn't exactly elegant. Clooney is trying hard to be believable, to be real, but he's undone at every turn by the self-assured calculation of the film around him.
For me, the movie's only real pleasure was the appearance of Robert Forster, an actor lured out of obscurity by Quentin Tarantino for his great role in Jackie Brown. Since then, Forster has appeared in movies and on TV here and there -- he was wonderful in the too-short-lived TV series Karen Cisco -- and Payne deserves credit for giving him a reasonably sized supporting role here, as Matt's taciturn father-in-law. When Forster is grousing on-screen, the movie seems momentarily alive. He's an old-time grouch, a world away from Payne's hipster misanthrope masquerading as a humanist, and I'll take one of those any day.
Casting Michael Shannon as a potential psychotic is a bit like crowing over the discovery that water is wet. And sure enough, in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter, showing here in Toronto after earlier fest-circuit stops at Sundance and Cannes, Shannon gets his chance to go all bug-eyed and thin-lipped, to sweat through his clothes, to go ballistic on the neighbors, warning them that a big storm is coming and it's going to wipe them out if they don't get ready.
Shannon's character has been having apocalyptic visions: Birds arrange themselves strange formations in the sky; yellow rain falls from above, as if God were expressing his dissatisfaction with mankind by taking one giant whiz all over the heartland. Is all of this really happening? Or is Shannon's character, a hardworking Midwesterner, suffering the early stages of paranoid schizophrenia? Wouldn't you like to know! His wife, played by Jessica Chastain, would, too. She doesn't quite know what to make of his behavior -- her husband has taken out a massive loan to spiff up the family's tornado shelter in preparation for the big biblical showdown, and she's none too happy about that, considering the couple's young daughter (Tova Stewart), who is deaf, has some upcoming heavy-duty medical expenses.
The first third or so of Take Shelter is suitably unsettling. Nichols, director of the 2007 Shotgun Stories, knows how to use the landscape (and CGI-enhanced weather) to build a sense of dread: The family's modest house, somewhere out in rural Ohio, ought to be cozy and safe, but it seems isolated and exposed, a sitting target in an expanse of brownish grass and grayish sky.
But how you'll ultimately feel about Take Shelter depends a lot on your tolerance for Shannon's pop-eyed nutcase routine. I feel I've seen it too many times before, and once, even just his turn in William Friedkin's Bug, would have been more than enough. Jessica Chastain, in one of her 1,001 movie roles this year, is far more restrained and more moving: She plays a character whose common sense is commingled with fear -- and, as it turns out, that's probably the combination she needs to survive. Her face, whether she's expressing wonder or anxiety, is the movie's most reliable weather report.
Read more of Stephanie Zacharek's 2011 Toronto International Film Festival coverage here.