George Clooney

Part of what’s going on in “The Descendants” is that Payne and co-writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (adapting a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, who gets to play a small supporting role) are calling on a time-honored dramatic strategy that goes back to Renaissance comedies, if not earlier: Concealing serious themes beneath a pleasant surface and a genial manner. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (who also shot Clooney’s “Ides of March”) delivers spectacular images of Hawaiian scenery and luxurious upper-crust life in the American tropics. Always a director who refuses to be rushed — either in making his films or in getting us through them — Payne ambles his characters from one unbelievably gorgeous location to another, pushed along by the tradewinds and by the mellowed-out rhythms of a soundtrack that’s likely to spark a mini-craze for Hawaiian slack-key guitar pop. And then there’s Clooney’s character, a bland, benign Honolulu lawyer named Matt King, who wears a Hawaiian shirt and rumpled chinos to work (yes, Aloha State readers, I know that’s normal) and seems supremely unprepared for the family crisis that has enveloped him.

Matt explains the whole situation in a series of rambling, discursive voice-over monologues that open the film: His wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie, who never utters a line), is in a coma following a boating accident. Matt, who has always been the “backup parent, the understudy,” is alone with Scottie (Amara Miller), his ferociously angry 10-year-old daughter. In desperation, he summons his older daughter, the alienated teenage Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), from her boarding school on the Big Island of Hawaii. At the same time, Matt faces a huge decision about the immense land trust he manages for his extended family, 25,000 pristine acres on the island of Kauai that represents the last untouched inheritance of Hawaiian royalty. (Matt and his tribe are “haoles,” or Hawaiian-born whites, but are descended from the House of Kamehameha through a great-great-grandmother.) The time to sell out to a developer, and reap an enormous payoff that will make the whole family rich, seems to have come — but the final decision lies with Matt.

Laying out the whole story in such a patently literary, anti-dramatic fashion can only be deliberate. Matt doesn’t simply tell us the facts in this introductory narration, but also tells us what he’s feeling and thinking: “If you’re trying to get my attention, Liz, it’s working,” he tells his wife, silent in her hospital bed. “I’m ready to change.” When she gets better, he assures us (or her, or no one in particular), he’ll buy her a house in France, travel around the world, and perhaps even talk about their relationship, which we gather has been on the skids for some time. On one hand, this layer of pounding obviousness on top of Clooney’s subtle, measured tragicomic performance is completely unnecessary. On the other, I kind of get it: Payne is cashing in on Clooney’s basic likability and on the level of trust we feel for him, and using this breezy narration to make a story about mortality, loss, betrayal and adultery go down as smooth as a beachfront Mai Tai at sunset.

I’m about to describe some important but early plot developments; I wouldn’t call them spoilers, but if you feel an allergic response coming on, feel free to bail out. Before we get to that, a few more words about Clooney, who has unquestionably become a braver and more ambitious actor in middle age, and no longer seems concerned with nurturing his personal vanity or protecting his star image. Matt is an undemonstrative and uncharismatic guy with bad hair and a sub-J. Crew wardrobe, who at first seems far too modest a character to hold our attention. That’s precisely the point. Clooney gets one big emotional scene, near the end of the film, that’s likely to send viewers fishing for their hankies. But Papamichael’s camera literally backs away from Matt’s moments of crisis, and most of Clooney’s delicate, wrenching performance here lies in subtle, almost invisible things, like the way he begins to look at other people differently and hold their gaze longer, as circumstances push him toward a more grown-up relationship with his family and the world.

I think Payne is arguing that the most melodramatic elements of the story, like the boating accident and the Kauai land-trust dilemma, are just the setup for Matt’s real drama, which is internal. He has to face the truth about his marriage, first of all, and start all over again with Alex, a near-adult he barely knows who seems to view both him and Elizabeth with unmitigated disgust. (I’ve heard more than one cynical viewer observe that Payne has pulled off a neat trick: A romance between George Clooney and a teenage girl that isn’t creepy.) If there’s a second Oscar in this movie, it may well go to the 20-year-old Woodley, previously known for the TV series “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” Alex has her own difficult emotional journey to make, as she’s thrust into the role of substitute mother to Scottie and her dad’s only emotional ally.

Matt has suspected the truth all along, and he’s about to get a heavily caffeinated double dose of it: Elizabeth isn’t getting better, and their marriage might have been over even without the head injury. Considering that this is a movie about a dying woman who lies hideously gnarled in a hospital bed and the cuckolded husband who half-suspects he deserves it, much of “The Descendants” plays as lightweight comedy. (In fact, on second viewing I see “The Descendants” as the faux-casual, American-indie alternative to Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” which cloaks similar emotional material in art-house grandiosity and science-fiction parable.) Matt and his family bumble episodically from one island of the Hawaiian archipelago to another, encountering Robert Forster in a bracing performance as Elizabeth’s righteously angry father, Beau Bridges as a boozy aging-hippie member of the King clan waiting for the money tap to turn on, Sid Krause providing comic relief as Alex’s stoner boyfriend, and Matthew Lillard (shticky) and Judy Greer (wonderful) as a real-estate hustler and his adorable wife.

There aren’t any huge surprises — or even too many small ones — about where “The Descendants” is going. (If you’ve ever seen a movie or a play or an episode of a TV series, you don’t even need to ask what decision Matt will make about those 25,000 unspoiled acres of paradise.) So how much you like it is largely a question of whether you enjoy getting there at Payne’s leisurely pace. There haven’t been many films set against the real-life culture of contemporary Hawaii (as opposed to touristy episodes shot on the beach), and Payne captures the slightly sleepy but fully modern atmosphere of the 50th state beautifully. Admittedly, the combination of great scenery, an interesting backdrop and two terrific acting performances easily goes far enough to make this movie a front-runner in the awards race. But I never got the feeling that I was experiencing something unexpected, or learning something new about the real world. There are quite a few better, braver and more ambitious films coming out this season, but this one has undeniable appeal and staying power. It’s a witty, well-crafted adult entertainment that hits its beats right on time and won’t insult your intelligence, with a great performance from one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars.

So no matter how many movies you see at Toronto — and I’ve seen plenty over the past week — you come home wishing you could have stayed longer, slept even less or sternly said no to party invitations. Among the films I didn’t see, I particularly regret Jennifer Westfeldt’s suddenly hot indie comedy “Friends With Kids,” Andrea Arnold’s reportedly abstract take on “Wuthering Heights,” Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s horror film “Intruders,” the ass-kicking Indonesian action film “The Raid,” Woody Harrelson’s star turn as a corrupt cop in “Rampart,” Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s “I Wish” … the list doesn’t stop.

All that said, here are 10 movies that were much discussed at Toronto and will definitely make news in the months ahead. The first five are highly plausible or possible Oscar contenders and likely box-office winners, and the second tier consists of “specialty audience” films, as they diplomatically say in the biz. (In English, that means they’ll do well in college towns, but there’s no point booking ‘em in the shopping malls.)

MAJOR BRANDS

The Descendants This leisurely and rather quiet family tragicomedy from writer-director Alexander Payne (his first film since “Sideways” in 2004) gets by on George Clooney’s restrained and nuanced performance as a battered middle-aged dad and its unusual depiction of Hawaii as a place where people actually live, rather than a tourist destination. But it’s grown on me since I first saw it, and Payne and Clooney are both in line for multiple awards nominations. I expect to see a critical backlash on “The Descendants” in the not-too-distant future, simply because it’s an audience-friendly film that doesn’t have tremendous cinematic ambition and tells a predictable story of crisis and redemption. I don’t suspect Clooney admirers, ordinary moviegoers or Oscar voters will care too much.

A Dangerous Method Another picture that was more subdued and straightforward than many viewers expected or hoped, David Cronenberg’s drama about Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), the patient-turned-therapist who came between them, remains a commercial question mark. This is a talky, elegant drama for grown-ups, largely shot in the actual European locations where Freud and Jung lived, not a twisted Cronenbergian psychodrama of orifices and nightmares. But I enjoyed its wit and vigor immensely, and suspect I’ll like it even better on second viewing. Brace yourselves, Keira-haters; Knightley is absolutely terrific as the brilliant femme fatale (and pioneering sexual masochist) who got elided from the history of psychiatry. If there’s an Oscar in this film, it’s probably hers.

Shame Arguably English artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen’s Dante-esque odyssey through sex addiction, with Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan playing a tormented brother and sister, belongs in the art-house category. (For one thing, “Shame” will require either an NC-17 rating or none at all, which will sharply limit its theatrical potential.) But given the star power, the brilliant acting and McQueen’s audacious filmmaking, there’s at least some chance “Shame” could become this year’s “Black Swan,” albeit on a smaller commercial scale. Fassbender won the acting award at Venice for this role, and an Oscar nod is completely plausible.

Moneyball I’ll be reviewing Bennett Miller’s adaptation of Michael Lewis’ stats-obsessed baseball best-seller next week, but it’s one of the fall season’s great unknowns. Baseball movies have long been tough sells to mass audiences, and for obvious reasons don’t play well internationally (except in Latin America and Japan). Still most people who saw “Moneyball” in Toronto report that it tells an engrossing story, and that Brad Pitt’s portrayal of innovative Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane could put him in the Oscar race — but if, and only if, enough people see the movie. Jonah Hill’s first major dramatic performance, as Beane’s assistant, might also be an awards candidate.

The Ides of March George Clooney’s cool and stylish political drama, starring the immensely hot Ryan Gosling as an idealistic media whiz facing the first major moral crisis of his young career, got mixed reviews in Toronto and arguably isn’t as distinctive as Clooney’s Oscar-nominated McCarthy-era yarn, “Good Night, and Good Luck.” But this is another case where the so-called smart people need to wait and see how ordinary viewers react. The movie’s beautiful to watch, capturing wintry Cincinnati landscapes as a sort of external corollary to its grim psychological landscape, and Gosling’s grave, measured performance — I’m tempted to call it a George Clooney performance by other means — is a memorable, artful construction. Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman could wind up battling each other in the supporting-actor race.

OUTSIDERS

Take Shelter Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ creepazoid psychological thriller, with Michael Shannon as a working-class Ohio man who becomes possessed by dreams and visions of apocalyptic storms, has been playing the festival circuit all year — and will finally be released just as this fall’s hurricane season winds down. I’ll be reviewing this soon, but here’s the two-second version: Holy cow! Made on a low budget and pitched halfway between a Terrence Malick or Stanley Kubrick nightmare and, say, M. Night Shyamalan, “Take Shelter” looks to me like one of the most memorable American films of the year. Shannon could be an Oscar dark horse — and certainly deserves to be — and the ubiquitous Jessica Chastain is very good as his troubled wife.

Your Sister’s Sister Seattle-based filmmaker Lynn Shelton made the festival hit “Humpday” a few years ago, which utterly failed to cross over to mainstream audiences despite tons of media chatter. Here she tries again, sticking to the improvisation-based relationship yarn but moving up in budget and in star quality. Emily Blunt and Mark Duplass play a pair of close friends with a complicated past (she was his late brother’s lover) who are clearly being drawn together, only to have the ever-terrific Rosemarie DeWitt, playing Blunt’s dogmatic vegan-lesbian sister, come between them unexpectedly. Comedy turns to darkness and then to some degree of redemption, and even in the overcrowded indie market, this satisfying and highly authentic-feeling indie could be Shelton’s breakthrough.

The Eye of the Storm Literary, dense and loaded with sharp observations, veteran Australian director Fred Schepisi’s adaptation of a novel by Nobel laureate Patrick White (a terrific writer not well known outside Australia) was my personal Toronto discovery. There’s nothing trendy or fashionable about “Eye of the Storm,” but check out the cast: Geoffrey Rush as a fading, horndog Australian actor and Judy Davis as his brittle, neurotic sister, a bankrupt Parisian divorcee with a ludicrous aristocratic title. They come home to Sydney to confront their immensely rich mother (Charlotte Rampling), who is near death and views them both with varying degrees of contempt. Add a delicious supporting cast and a hilarious portrayal of Aussie society circa 1972, and you have — well, you have something that I liked a lot, and I suspect, perhaps naively, that a grown-up, book-readin’-type audience is still out there somewhere.

Think of Me Lauren Ambrose, who played the red-haired teenage daughter on “Six Feet Under,” has been waiting for her breakout role as an adult, and if writer-director Bryan Wizemann’s downbeat single-mom drama isn’t quite that, it’s pretty close. As a struggling Las Vegas single mom named Angela, Ambrose walks the line between likable and utterly intolerable. Angela turns tricks (sometimes ineptly), works two jobs (not very well) and drags her 8-year-old daughter from one perilous situation to the next. Ambrose is on-screen for virtually every second, emanating a gorgeous, doomed charisma, and holds you in suspense the whole way. Ultimately, I suspect that “Think of Me” is too depressing to offer Ambrose her “Winter’s Bone” moment, but it’s a worthwhile recession-era drama built around a terrific performance.

The Loneliest Planet OK, I haven’t yet seen the newest film from ultra-smart indie auteur Julia Loktev, who made the strange and powerful terrorism drama “Day Night Day Night” in 2007, but I’m going to crawl out on a limb for it anyway. (It will screen at the New York Film Festival in a few weeks.) Gael García Bernal and Hani Furstenburg play a gorgeous and privileged couple who go hiking in the Caucasus, with explosive and unexpected consequences. Inspired by a Tom Bissell short story that was itself inspired by a Hemingway story, “The Loneliest Planet” will probably end up as a modest theatrical or VOD release — but everybody I know who saw it in Toronto said it was remarkable.

Bonus Pick: Take This Waltz I’ve already written a lengthy review of Sarah Polley’s potent, sexy, audience-dividing relationship flick, which stars Michelle Williams in one of her best performances. There’s still no news on an American distributor, and the Toronto scuttlebutt suggests this may not be released until 2012, to avoid competition with Williams’ presumed award-candidate role in “My Week With Marilyn.” It’s still great! But we’ll have to adjourn the debate for another occasion. 

This is George Clooney’s star vehicle this fall — as opposed to “The Ides of March,” which he directed and in which he plays a supporting role — and this is the one that may see him collecting gold figurines during the cold-weather months. Clooney’s gotten better and braver as he’s aged, and no longer seems the least concerned with nurturing his personal vanity or protecting his star image. He is unquestionably the star of “The Descendants,” but his character, a slightly disheveled Honolulu lawyer named Matt King who seems to view chinos and a Hawaiian shirt as formal attire, is not exactly a glamorous movie hero.

Matt faces a number of crises at once, and is ill prepared for all of them. His wife is in a coma after a serious boating accident, and his daughters, 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scotty (Judy Greer) are in open rebellion against parental authority. Matt’s superficially eager to seize the moment and become a better husband and father, but essentially has no idea how to manage it. Then there’s the immense land trust he manages for his extended family, 25,000 pristine acres on the island of Kauai that represents the last untouched inheritance of Hawaiian royalty. (Matt and his tribe are “haoles,” or white Hawaiians, but are descended from the House of Kamehameha through a great-great-grandmother.) The time to sell out to a developer, and reap an enormous payoff that will make the whole family rich, seems to have come — but the final decision lies with Matt.

There’s more to explain, but since this movie won’t reach theaters until November, I’ll save a more detailed plot discussion for another time. But Clooney’s understated performance as an undemonstrative guy, who at first seems way too bland and average to hold our attention, is the heart of the movie’s appeal and its genius. Payne is a director who refuses to be rushed — it’s been seven years since he made “Sideways,” and “The Descendants” bumbles episodically around the Hawaiian islands, buffeted by trade winds and gently supported by slack-key guitar pop. Matt has to grow gradually in seriousness and moral stature along the way, as he realizes that he may be losing Elizabeth for good — and might have even without the boat accident.

There aren’t any huge surprises about where “The Descendants” is going. (If you’ve ever seen a movie or a play or a television episode, you don’t even need to wonder what Matt’s going to do with that land.) So how much you like it will largely be a question of whether you enjoy getting there at Payne’s leisurely pace. There haven’t been many films set against the real-life culture of contemporary Hawaii (as opposed to touristy episodes shot on the beach), and Payne captures the slightly sleepy but fully modern atmosphere beautifully. But spectacular scenery and an interesting backdrop only gets you so far, and “The Descendants” follows the delicate music between the characters as Matt takes his first baby steps toward a new relationship with his family and the world. He forges an uneasy but tender alliance with Alexandra — who is suddenly forced into the role of substitute mom for her little sister — and realizes for the first time that her stoner boyfriend, Sid (nice comic relief from Nick Krause), isn’t as much of an idiot as he thought.

Clooney does have one big emotional scene — and it will break you down if you have any kind of heart — but his performance is really about tiny details, like the way he starts to look at other people a little differently, without saying anything. It’s as if he realizes for the first time that they are suffering human beings just the way he is, and that his blithe Hawaiian businessman’s optimism is an utterly inadequate response and always was. Exactly what’s likely to appeal to a large moviegoing audience about the King family is the fact that they’re ordinary people facing an altogether ordinary tragedy in an extraordinary setting, with a bit of highly symbolic side action attached. Heck, I’ve seen better and more adventurous movies than this; I’ve seen some this week. But “The Descendants” is gentle, witty, audience-friendly entertainment for grown-ups, with a great performance by one of our biggest screen stars.

This is Clooney’s fourth feature as a director, and if he doesn’t really have what you’d call an auteur’s signature, he’s an understated craftsman with good storytelling instincts and an old-style Hollywood desire to let his actors tell the story. “The Ides of March” has been received respectfully here, but not with raves, which partly reflects the downbeat nature of its story and may also have to do with the modest role played by Clooney himself. Once again he casts himself as a supporting character, a cool and cryptic Democratic presidential candidate named Mike Morris, who presents himself as a fire-breathing populist revolutionary in public but maintains a clipped, acerbic distance from even his closest advisors. (Jennifer Ehle, otherwise known as that really terrific actress you can’t quite place, has a nice role as his wife.) At first glance, and even at second, Morris is a dream candidate, a sitting governor of Pennsylvania who has balanced the budget and advocates an ambitious program of national renewal: mandatory national service for high-school graduates, balanced with free college tuition and healthcare for all. (He’s also an agnostic or atheist who refuses to discuss religion, which may be the most improbable element of all.)

One could compare Morris to various real-life candidates who clearly informed Willimon’s play, but that risks revealing important plot points in a movie that won’t hit theaters for several weeks. (Clooney co-wrote the screenplay with Willimon and producer Grant Heslov.) Suffice it to say that Morris may not entirely be what he seems to be — what candidate ever is? — and in any case he’s just an accessory to the moral drama of Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling), his hotshot 30-year-old media strategist, who has pushed Morris right to the edge of winning the Democratic nomination. Gosling suddenly seems to be everywhere — in every major film, at every festival, in every gossip item — and I’m tempted to call him the hottest male star in Hollywood since George Clooney. (His L.A. car thriller “Drive” opens next week, which may be a bigger potential hit than this film.) Certainly “Ides of March” is a fortuitous marriage of actor and director, with Clooney clearing out the middle of the film to let Gosling’s natural gravity and watchfulness be the focus.

Yes, he’s good-looking too, but Stephen is so devoted to the Morris campaign that he’s a distracted playboy at best. He goes to bed with a cute young intern (Evan Rachel Wood) whose name he can’t keep straight, but even while they’re in the supposed throes of passion Stephen can’t keep his eyes off the TV screen, where breaking news might send the Ohio poll numbers ticking up or down. He’s ambitious and brilliant, but thinks of himself as a man of principle, who will do anything to help Morris win, but only because the cause is a noble one. Morris is locked in a neck-and-neck contest in Ohio with his last remaining challenger, a senator named Pullman whom we never learn anything about (except that the Republicans think he’s more beatable than Morris). In this world of jargon-rich, warlike dialogue and gray, late-spring Cincinnati streets — it’s like an episode of “The West Wing,” with more cinema and more cynicism — Stephen’s big crisis blows past so fast, like a truck on the highway, that neither he nor we notice it till it’s gone.

Morris’ bulldog campaign manager, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, doesn’t trust Stephen, who is younger, better looking and arguably more intelligent, and Pullman’s campaign manager (the always enjoyable Paul Giamatti) makes a devious play to lure Stephen to his side, hinting that things he doesn’t know about yet will sink the Morris campaign. Throw in Marisa Tomei, looking frumpy for the first time in her career and playing a ruthless New York Times reporter, and it all becomes a baffling, fast-moving game of who’s playing whom, and to what ends. Stephen, Morris, the two campaign managers and Wood’s 20-year-old intern (her name, which Stephen eventually masters, is Molly) are all plunged down the slippery slope of sleaze and tragedy.

Arguably “The Ides of March” has nothing to say about American electoral politics we don’t already know, i.e., the system is broken and those who enter it are soon stripped of their ideals and reduced to viciousness. But as in his McCarthy-era media yarn “Good Night, and Good Luck,” Clooney is trying to create stylish, audience-friendly pop entertainment that’s also thought-provoking, not to write an essay for Harper’s. As a director, Clooney is often compared to Steven Soderbergh, his acknowledged mentor, but I see him shaping into a slightly different kind of artist, part Frank Capra and part Michael Mann. This film may not be quite as distinctive as that one, and it’s certainly more pessimistic in tone. But it’s another step in the intriguing mid-career reinvention of one of Hollywood’s shrewdest stars.

“The Ides of March” will open Oct. 7 nationwide.