For its first hour or so, Alexander Payne’s new movie chugs along like just another installment in his series of
great, smart, idiosyncratic adult comedies, this one charting the exploding family life of a reluctant Hawaiian zillionaire (George Clooney, so good). But where
Election and
Sideways wound their ways to bittersweet tableaux of hope,
The Descendants plunges viewers, in the film’s home stretch, into unprecedentedly raw emotional territory, and Payne is
just as adept with loss and heartbreak as he is with human comedy. It’s amazing. (
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