Petersen began his directing career in German television during the 1960s. His first feature film, “One of Us Two” (1973), won the German National Film Prize for director. In 1981, he directed the acclaimed “Das Boot,” for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for best director. And after moving to the United States, Petersen wrote and directed the stylish thriller “Shattered.”

His other films include “In the Line of Fire,” “Outbreak” and “Air Force One.” We spoke a few days after the opening of “The Perfect Storm,” and the publication of Salon’s not exactly glowing review of the film — “loaded with dumb dialogue and blubbery melodrama,” wrote staff critic Stephanie Zacharek.

Petersen began our conversation by good-naturedly needling me about the review, “So this is Salon, eh? You are really big fans of my movie. I hear that Salon hated ‘The Perfect Storm.’ Why did they hate it? Who wrote the review? Did you write it?”

“No, I didn’t write it,” I was relieved to be able to tell him.

“Well,” Petersen continued, “maybe hate is too strong a word. I heard only that it was negative. [He laughs.] I’m fine about it. I’m only a little bit joking. But I thought maybe you had written it, and then I was going to have some fun with you. I’m perfectly fine about the review. Now, let’s begin.” And so we did.

What attracted you to directing “The Perfect Storm”?

Everything started with Sebastian Junger’s book because in reading the book ["The Perfect Storm"] I got into this world in Gloucester, Mass., which I found fascinating. I grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and know a little bit about the water, ships and boats. But I had no idea about the fishing industry. And the book gave me a pretty good insight into what kind of job it is, how dangerous and hard. But then, what became the most important thing to me was that here was a true portrait of a contemporary, American blue-collar world.

That became fascinating when I considered making a big movie out of it. To do that would be miles apart from what Hollywood normally portrays — you know, the more glamorous jobs. And I wanted to go with the common man or the “little people,” so to speak.

Then, of course, I could deal again with the frightening element of water. I just love that and it’s always a challenge for me to do a film that deals with that element. I did it 19 years ago [in "Das Boot"] and I was ready to do it again.

What is it with you and the water? There’s “Das Boot,” which takes place in a submarine. There’s “Shattered,” where an eerie, key scene occurs underwater. Tell me more about your fascination with water.

I grew up in a little town called Emden in Germany and, later, Hamburg. Both had harbors, ports and shipyards, although Hamburg was a very big seaport. As a boy, I was just hanging out with these people on boats and ships, and whenever I wanted to think about life and philosophy, I’d just go and sit on the shore and look out at the ocean. The sea was magical to me. As a 13-year-old, it was a place where my imagination and fantasies were transported to infinity.

Also, when I was 6 or 7 years old, during the 1940s, something powerful happened. I will never forget this. It was shortly after the war in Germany and we were very, very hungry people. All of a sudden, I remember that out of the mists of the sea came these huge ships streaming into the harbor. Again and again. They were mostly American ships, and we were looking up at these ships. Sailors onboard were throwing to us kids below all kinds of goodies, like food and chewing gum. We scurried around like little rats to grab the food. And that added to my idea of wonder coming out of the sea, that the ocean carries us to places far off, like spaceships do. These memories add to my feeling that the sea is a magical place. I’m very connected to it.

You’ve been praised for depicting working-class heroes in “The Perfect Storm” and you just told me that was a key attraction in directing the film. Do you think this struck a chord with Americans?

I’m totally shocked and surprised that the movie did so well. The so-called experts said that the big winner over the Fourth of July weekend would be “The Patriot” because of Mel Gibson and the movie’s theme of the American Revolution. Plus, there was a question mark about our film having an ending in which the main characters die. It’s not your usual Hollywood ending. Also, the polls said that “The Patriot” would be ahead of us. So we said, “OK. They will open better than we will. But let’s see who has the better legs.” That was our defensive position.

But then it happened the other way around. It was shocking in a great sense for us. We were thrilled. We will break $100 million on Monday [July 10], which is incredible after 10 days. But it’s always hard to tell what audiences really reacted to. Our thought is that perhaps this is not your typical big-time, popcorn Hollywood movie. That may be attractive to people. Also, maybe you were curious about the film because it doesn’t feature big stars. It’s working fishermen, who are out in a huge storm. It’s kind of a fresh idea.

Also, there were breakthroughs in special effects. For the first time we as filmmakers were able to get the audience into a world where they normally can’t go. We certainly never shoot in the midst of an apocalyptic storm for we would end up dead. And people might have been attracted to seeing that.

The other thing is that, right now, George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg are very hot guys. They are new, fresh and not from the older generation of movie stars. There’s a lot of interest in that. We have a strong female audience, slightly more female than male, something like 52 percent to 48 percent. That might have to do with George and Mark.

Other than that, I don’t know. Sometimes, the audience just has a strong feeling that we can’t completely figure out. I can only say I’m very happy about it.

How was it working with George Clooney?

He’s very down to earth. Extremely funny. Cracking jokes all the time. He’s really a duke. We needed each other to be on the same level. I like to have a happy set, where everybody feels good and we are having fun. I don’t like what you very often find on Hollywood sets — tension, screaming and yelling. I can’t work like that. I like so much what I’m doing, going to the stage every day and shooting a movie, and I think that’s contagious and actors feel more comfortable. And that’s exactly who George is, too. He fits in perfectly. He’s a workaholic who likes to go to work and wants to have fun.

The shoot was so tough — you probably can’t imagine it — with the enormous amounts of water these guys endured, and the rocking boat and the seasickness on the set. It was real good we had George, who kept everyone’s morale up and who cracked all these jokes and never complained. He was great.

It’s hard to imagine jokes flying on the set of a film like “Storm.” But perhaps it’s the only way you can deal with a tragic tale. How was it working with Mark Wahlberg?

Mark is a sweetheart. He was so perfect for the part. He’s from that area, he’s from a real working-class background, with eight or nine brothers and sisters. And his accent is genuine. He was really into researching the characters. He slept in the real Bobby Shatford’s room at the Crow’s Nest [bar] for a few weeks. He was there all the time, hanging out in the bar, playing pool with the guys, listening to them talk. He started deep friendships with the Shatfords and with Bobby’s mother, who was still alive at the time but who recently passed away. He really took this movie seriously. He’s great in the part and I think he has a great future. He’s only 28 or 29 years old, but he will be a big star.

Is the ocean the real star in this movie?

The real star is the storm. Originally, I was planning to cast Mel Gibson as the lead, but it didn’t work out. He was doing “The Patriot.” We had serious talks, but it was too tricky with his schedule. And there was the fact that he’s a superstar — he’s so expensive. Our movie was already so expensive [at $140 million] that we decided to go with George. In the end, I thought it was the right decision, anyway. George blends much better into the whole landscape there, into the story, and is more of an ensemble player than Mel Gibson could ever be. Mel is so much of a movie star.

The film incorporates many computer-generated special effects. How did you like directing both humans and computers at different stages of the film?

That was fascinating. It’s a great process. People may think it restricts the creativity for the director, but it actually opens it up. You are working on these images like a painter or a sculptor. I can design the whole look of the ocean, getting a higher crest on this wave here, or more wind and lightning there. Industrial Light and Magic [George Lucas' special-effects house in San Rafael, Calif.] will do whatever you want. Bit it’s not like ILM will make this look like a great storm, and then we’re done. No. It’s a laborious effort.

A lot of these scenes were shot on the boat with water drenching the actors, who were set against a blue screen. We worked on the special effects over a satellite system that linked ILM to us. They were working up north, and I was working down here, and we each had a satellite dish and a permanent link. Twice a week we’d meet [in a teleconference] with 20 or 30 people from up there, and we’d have 10 people sitting down here. I could see them [on a monitor] and they could see us. We’d both see a shot on our video monitors. Sometimes, ILM would very carefully extend our waves that we had made on the stage. But, basically, it was up to me and Stefen Fangmeier [of ILM], who would basically ask me: “What do you want to do in this scene?”

“I’d like to have a 45-feet-high wave, not 40 feet, and I want the sky a little darker,” [I'd reply]. We’d start working on one whole image and design it. It was a fascinating process in which we had complete control.

They’d send us 15 shots or so a week, all works-in-progress shots. And then we’d go through them. “What do you want here?” they’d ask. It was a very layered process. But that doesn’t mean it was done all in one sitting. I had to come back and we’d adjust and adjust, sometimes for weeks and weeks, until finally that one shot is completed. It was very elaborate, but you really do get to create your own vision of a storm.

The emphasis on special effects is one of the criticisms of “The Perfect Storm.” Are you concerned with special effects and computer wizardry in Hollywood replacing the old-fashioned elements of story, plot and character development?

There is always that danger. You can’t be too much impressed by the special-effects thing. But for the movies I do, I think it will help me, because the idea of “The Perfect Storm” is not, “Look, guys, at what great effects we have!” It’s more about telling a story of real men who go out to sea and encounter an incredible storm. It’s a real tale in a realistic world.

We tried to use all of these computer tools to tell a true story. Since I tend to do these kinds of stories anyway, these tools are absolutely wonderful for me. I can now get into territory and worlds I never could have gotten into before. You could not have done a film like “The Perfect Storm” a few years ago. Water is the most difficult thing to re-create and create in the computer and, for the first time, they’ve successfully figured out how to re-create water by working with “The Perfect Storm.”

I see this whole special-effects thing as helping tell a story in a better way — especially for films I like. And to get us to real places and situations where we normally cannot go and get out alive. But if it’s merely effects for effects’ sake, then you are in danger of losing the keys of storytelling and character. And that’s a real danger.

You were involved early on in devising the Web site for “The Perfect Storm.” Do you see the Web as a totally different form of film entertainment? Or is it simply part of a movie’s promotional efforts?

The Internet was completely new to me and I had never done this for any of my films. Three years ago, it was not as popular to have a Web site, not until “The Blair Witch Project,” which changed a lot of things here.

But we thought in order to get great publicity for “The Perfect Storm,” let’s really work on an interesting Web site. I must say, I still don’t completely understand how to measure the Web. When I hear about all these hits, these hundreds of thousands of hits, what does that really mean? How do you measure its success? It’s all so new. But I was surprised about our success over the [Fourth of July] weekend. We found that almost two out of three people wanted to see “The Perfect Storm” over “The Patriot.” And maybe part of that had to do with the fact that a lot of people saw our Web site, which was complex and well-visited. We didn’t take any chances, and designed the site as well as we could, hoping it would add to the whole promotion.

At some point, a feature-length film will be on the Internet. The big question, though, is how do you control it and make sure you’re not going to get financially ripped off?

But watching films in a theater with a big screen will never change. Everybody still loves that. Movies in theater are more popular than ever, even with DVD and videos and laser. People still go like crazy to theaters and sit with 1,000 other people, partly because it’s a tribal experience.

How different are European film audiences than American moviegoers in your experience?

Wow! How different are they? Very. Europeans are quieter and more pensive. When I first came here to America, I arrived with the typical European arrogance and went to see “Star Wars” in a huge theater with 2,000 people, who ranged in age from 8 to 88. But when the film started, they were all screaming and yelling at the action on the screen. It was unbelievable. I was shocked. Americans really talk to the screen — and they are loud. It’s like a circus. I love that. In Europe, when you go the movies, it’s like going to a temple to see art. You’d never yell at the screen.

Were you worried about “The Perfect Storm” being judged harshly by the real characters it depicted?

Oh yes, very. I was concerned and hoped they would see it and appreciate the way we did it. We screened it for the people in Gloucester and had a party afterwards and it was a very emotional time. It was a lovefest. A lot of tears but also a lot of hugging, too. “This is our life,” they said. “Thank you for a great tribute to our world.” And the people who are the closest to the Andrea Gail victims were very relieved. Chris Carter [the woman, played by Diane Lane in the film, who lost her lover to the sea] said that the film was a closure for her.

Of course, they were saddened because after eight years they had to go through it again. But they were proud, too. We tried to show the men on the Andrea Gail as good people with problems, hopes and dreams. Their world is blood, sweat and tears, but the residents are all proud of what they do. It was an unusual experience for me. Bottom line, it was great.

So what are you on to next?

It’s too early to say. This film took a lot out of me. I go to Europe and then to Japan to promote it. Then, I’ll come back and take a deep breath. And then you can call me again to ask.

Six months later, “John Carter” became one of the costliest flops in Hollywood history, and while the film may have its redeeming qualities, story structure isn’t among them. Read in retrospect, the Stanton profile now seems laden with irony, and it isn’t alone: A striking number of recent New Yorker features on movie directors and actors have been followed by embarrassing setbacks for the artists in question, usually involving the very projects that the articles are extolling.

In other words, whenever a New Yorker profile shows a director hard at work in the editing room, the studio should start to worry. Since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects — Steve Carell, Guillermo del Toro, Anna Faris, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton  — experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared. And while I’ll discuss the one exception in a moment, such a dire track record might well give pause to Armando Iannucci, the British director of “In the Loop,” who was profiled by the magazine in March.

To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days. It doesn’t always hold true — Dana Goodyear’s profile of James Cameron certainly didn’t hurt “Avatar” — but when it does, the results can be startling, especially when you set the articles alongside the films they so effusively describe. Tad Friend’s profile of Steve Carell, for instance, portrays its subject as “a brilliant piece of software, a 2.0 fix for the problem of unfunny comedy,” whose approach to collaboration is nothing less than “a painstaking set of procedures aimed at maximum creativity.” The result? “Dinner for Schmucks,” a critical and commercial nonevent that few would hold up as a model of “the golden age of improvisation.”

Other profiles read even more strangely in hindsight. Last May, the film “Bridesmaids” had everyone talking about the role of women in modern comedy, a topic that Friend addressed in a lengthy feature published the month before. “What’s at stake is not merely a tenable marketplace for ‘hard’ female comedies,” he writes, “but a fresh vantage on romance and, perhaps, a fresh way of seeing men and women.” Unfortunately, he isn’t talking about “Bridesmaids,” but about Anna Faris in “What’s Your Number?,” which came out in September and promptly sank like a stone.

I don’t mean to pick on Tad Friend, a fine and perceptive writer, because he certainly isn’t alone. I first noticed the phenomenon in an article on Tony Gilroy by D.T. Max, who glowingly describes the creative process behind the underwhelming “Duplicity.” More recently, Guillermo del Toro had the curse hit him twice, first during the writing of a profile by features editor Daniel Zalewski, which coincided with del Toro’s departure from “The Hobbit,” and shortly after the piece appeared, when Universal passed on “At the Mountains of Madness.” These articles are invariably graceful, smart,and insightful — and their subjects are all talented. Yet there’s no shaking the sense that such a feature rarely bodes well for the future.

Sports fans have talked for decades about a Sports Illustrated jinx, in which a player’s cover appearance seems to lead to a string of unusual bad luck. The reason for the jinx, if it exists, isn’t hard to understand: Athletes generally make the cover after an exceptional performance, which is right when they often regress to the mean. The New Yorker doesn’t put stars on the cover, but its features are valuable real estate, so it tends to favor subjects with a big success already behind them. There’s room in the magazine for emerging artists, but it’s in the Brooklyn of the back pages, not the Manhattan of the features section, which prefers seemingly sure things. Much as in Hollywood itself, you can’t get fired for going with last year’s star.

In finance, this is called performance chasing. It means investing in today’s interview subject based on yesterday’s hit movie, which, as an outlier, is often followed by a slump. This is how we get a look behind the scenes of “Duplicity,” not “Michael Clayton,” and it sometimes results in reportage that has a troubling tendency to ignore obvious warning signs. Anthony Lane’s feature on John Lasseter and “Cars 2,” for instance, is written in his characteristically prickly style, but for all his evident cynicism, he never raises a crucial point that many other observers had noted at the time, which was that Pixar was making a sequel to one of its weakest films. In the end, Lane’s skepticism is only skin deep, and it’s ultimately sacrificed to the needs of the narrative, in which the critic is grudgingly won over by the studio’s charms.

Occasionally, of course, the feature section does devote space to an emerging talent, as Rebecca Mead did last year with the director Lena Dunham, before the release of “Tiny Furniture.” (Iannucci can take some comfort from Dunham’s example: Their shows “Veep” and “Girls” were both renewed last week by HBO, one of the few forces around that can reliably beat the curse.) In this article, the exception mentioned above, several elements combine to push it into feature territory — social media, the New York art scene, “the cinema of unexamined privilege” — and the result is a rare instance of a profile catching an artist on the way up. Dunham jumps the queue because her story feeds into fashionable issues, a fact she lightly mocks: “There’s always an article coming out, saying ‘The new thing is funny women.’”

And this gets close to the heart of the problem. Many feature articles — including this one — strive to tie a bow on the story, to tether themselves to some larger theme, a tendency visibly pronounced at the New Yorker, thanks both to its reputation and to the relatively small number of movie features it publishes. At four or so profiles per year, an article can’t just be about Steve Carell or Tony Gilroy or Anna Faris: To justify the use of such premium space, it has to be about the future of comedy, or adult drama, or funny women, which leads to grand claims that can ultimately seem peculiar when we finally see “Dinner for Schmucks.”

“Nobody knows anything,” the writer William Goldman famously said of Hollywood, and if that’s true of filmmakers, it’s doubly true of the journalists who try to draw conclusions about so unpredictable an industry. If journalism is the first draft of history, it’s no surprise that the draft occasionally contains 10 finely reported pages on “What’s Your Number?” But that shouldn’t stop reporters from trying. We desperately need thoughtful articles that go deeper than the average star profile, like Ian Parker’s New Yorker feature from a few years back on George Clooney, which remains one of my favorite pieces ever published in the magazine. It came out the same month, naturally, as “Leatherheads.”

That strategy seems to have worked out pretty well for the guy. That’s why many of us currently raising our children in a culture full of forces trying to shield them from storybooks and the facts of life saw the Clooney family story as an inspiration, the epitome of bonding and parenting done right. And it made us go straight to the source and ask for some child-rearing insight from the man who gave us George Clooney — Nick Clooney himself. After genially joking about his “terrible ordeal” in jail over the weekend, and before taking his dog out for a morning walk, the veteran journalist spoke to Salon Wednesday on raising children who want to change the world.

What can we as parents do now so that someday, we might get to know what it feels like to ride in the back of a police van with our Oscar-winning, beloved humanitarian offspring?

In a lot of ways, it simply happens. Both of my children [Clooney also has a daughter, Ada] are extraordinary people, and a lot of that is just within them. Most of it is George himself. He tries to and does give credit to us for what we’ve done, but if he’d turned to be a serial killer I wouldn’t have been riding in the back of that paddy wagon with him.

How did you talk to your children when they were growing up?

We always talked about what was going on in the world. We talked about it at the breakfast table; we talked about it in the car. And we always wanted everybody in the family to know how we felt about things, especially about justice in the world. But we always tried to do it with humor and something that matched George’s and our daughter’s experiences. I hate sermonizing.

You throw out 58 homilies and you hope that one or two of them stick. And then our children would occasionally surprise us by spitting them back at us.

Based on the events of last weekend, that still happens.

We have continued to do that all throughout our lives.  When we pick up the phone now, we talk about what’s going on with us, and then we talk about what’s going on in the world.

As a newsman, what do you say to people who feel children need to be protected from the upsetting events in the world?

Perhaps we were negligent in protecting our children. We instead always opted for involvement. We always believed that was the best thing for us to do and for them to do. We believed that if someone is down on the ground, we should not be standing there and doing nothing. That has always mattered to us, and that always mattered to my grandmother and grandfather who raised me. And I hope that I’m passing it on to my children.

I grew up admiring my cousin George, then, in the way cousins do older cousins. Like many younger cousins, I witnessed his achievements mostly from a distance. And in that way my relationship with George Clooney is sometimes like the relationship of a lot of moviegoers with George Clooney. He is a cultural icon, after all, with his own channel on my Time Warner pay-per-view menu. Because the icon of George Clooney is so culturally pervasive, I see him on big screens and small screens more often than I see him as a member of our family, at family gatherings (where he is charming, kind, cool and venerable, as you’d expect an older cousin — and George Clooney — to be).

I have never written about my cousin because I think family should be a safe haven from exploitation. “We don’t do that,” I told someone at a family reunion a couple of years back, as she tried to take a cellphone photo of George’s ass as he leaned over some ill-placed guacamole. “It’s for the ladies at my church,” she replied.

But I’m writing this now because this essay isn’t really about George Clooney. It’s about my father, and the culture, and the weirdness of fame and art, and mostly the weirdness of remembrance. It’s about what happens when the art of one far-flung family icon makes you remember so viscerally the life of another obscure one, an icon famous nowhere but among the barns, and in the four shabby chambers of a daughter’s heart.

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I just watched “The Descendants” for the second time. I have never seen my older cousin look so vulnerable, and I think this is one part of why he reminded me of my father. George Clooney is not related to my father; George is my mother’s nephew. But my father’s name was George Matthew (he went by Matthew) and in the movie, George’s character’s name is Matthew. More important, my father, Matthew, died after a coma, and in the movie, Matthew’s wife dies after a coma. This is what triggered it: the look of the pallid skin of Matthew’s wife, the face of a coma, jaundiced and slack-jawed and tight around the eyes so that, like a skeleton — like death — it takes on the appearance of genderlessness. Elizabeth, Matthew’s wife, looked just like my father, Matthew, in his coma, down to the crusty mouth and the clawed-up hands. I hadn’t seen a coma since my father died — not one that looked so real. And that’s what really started it, the avalanche of coincidence.

My father, Matthew, was kept alive, for a while, by machines, and in the movie Matthew’s wife lives by machine until she is taken off of it; her family waits in the hospital for her to die, which is what happened with my father. My father was unfaithful, and in the movie Matthew’s wife is unfaithful. When my father died, I was a 21-year-old girl giving him shit, in part about the way he was raising my much-younger sister (which thinly disguised a bratty critique of the way he failed to raise me). In the movie, Matthew’s daughter is a 17-year-old girl giving him shit about, among other things, the way he raises her much-younger sister (which thinly disguises a bratty critique of the way he raised her).

In the movie, Matthew looks confused and quietly, desperately sad. This is a look my father wore, a lot, and one I wish I could reach through the ether to relieve. When I was 21 I thought my angry quips to my father were merely the preamble to a closer, more honest dialogue with him. I yelled only to wait for his answer. But he died before he could respond. So my unmeant words are the words that are left. They hang in the air.

In “The Descendants,” Matthew’s daughter also loses a parent in the middle of a conflict, but because her father survives, she is able to mend things with him, to admit she admires him. They work together to undo her mother’s paramour, and this conspiracy bonds them (Aristotle said it: The enemy of your enemy is your friend). The sweet, tepid ending of the movie is so good because it’s so prosaic; Matthew and his daughters watch TV, their feet sticking out of Elizabeth’s childhood quilt. This is what you do with the relics of the dead. You keep living with them until (like the fact of the death itself) they acquire the ordinariness of truth.

George Matthew became my father on Nov. 24, and in the movie another father dies on Nov. 24. In “The Descendants,” Matthew’s wife is buried at sea by Matthew and his daughters. I, too, buried my father at sea. “The Descendants” shows the ashes clouding the ocean and the leis skimming the water like fat skimming soup.

My father’s ashes in the marina, and the blooms that followed, looked the same. They circled one another like free-form, cardiac amoebas. Thus the movie reminded me of an image I’d never forget but hadn’t remembered for a long time.

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I don’t know whether George Clooney knew my father very well. Because my mother lived with her older sister, I grew up with my aunt Rosemary’s branch of the family in California. George moved to California in the early ’80s, but he moved out of my aunt’s house and onto his own life quickly. My aunt’s children were akin to my mother’s siblings, and they were the ones who knew my dad before and while my folks were married, who were my godmothers and godfathers and the attendants at my mom and dad’s wedding. My mom was sexually abused when she was a kid, though, and eventually came out about it, and coming out meant that she got exiled from my aunt’s branch of the family. When my dad died a couple of years later, it was not a surprise that I didn’t hear anything from the family I’d known as family.

But it was a surprise that, a decade or so later, it moved me so much to watch my cousin George encountering what I encountered with my father. It was a surprise that somehow, strangely, it comforted me. Probably because “The Descendants” extends the relationship between father and daughter beyond the point of crisis (which is part of what makes the movie so interesting, because so few films move relationships beyond a point of crisis without being conventional). Probably because, wishing for my dad, I lived vicariously through the characters.

It is also, though, the mere act of witnessing “The Descendants” that comforts me even as it tears me up; and I suppose this is the power of art, and of story — only connect, as E.M. Forster wrote. To see George playing a Matthew staggering under the familiar weight of mourning, under the specificity of a circumstance I have known and stumbled under — to see it, felt like my cousin was comforting me. To see my father’s hurt, and the same hurt I have felt, spread across the movie-huge space of his monochrome eyes — eyes not the same shape (the shape is my father’s) but the same near-black as mine — it was bizarre, and at the same time evocative of an eerie solidarity.

Please don’t misunderstand me. It is not a personalized solidarity. Whether or not George knew or remembered my father, Matthew, he does not know how my father, Matthew, died — we’ve never talked about it. (Why would we?) George would never know the slew of coincidences piled between my own history and “The Descendants’” script. (Why should he?) And yet, still, how weird and how wrenching to watch him live through such a thing.

Which is why the movie is so good. At its end I cried and so did a woman in a butch haircut three rows ahead of me. Which shows what I’m trying to say:  You don’t have to be George Clooney’s cousin, you don’t have to share his eye color (which might just be another coincidence; our grandmother had blue eyes, after all) to have a great movie evoke that desired effect, to move audiences not by replication of experience but by honesty of emotion, by verisimilitude, by sheer earned vulnerability, by the remembrance of life’s saddest turns and most commonplace glories.

And this, this tribute to art, and challenge to life: how strange that it was my cousin whom I did not really know, a human playing an icon playing another human, who made me feel that, of all my family, he understood my sadness and mourning and hope.

And in this way, though we all fail in the face of icons — be they famous or familiar — the truth of iconography can sometimes bring comfort closer.

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.