Salon.com > The Descendants

Seeing my father, through my cousin George

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Every icon has a person living inside. It’s true of famous people, and true of everyday icons, too — the idealized figures against which we hold the real people we love. When iconography and reality press close enough to break the skin of one another, things can get uncanny quickly. And things got really uncanny for me when I saw "The Descendants."

One reason for this is that my cousin is George Clooney. He’s older than I am, old enough to have fathered me if he’d really had to (he would have been a high school junior, but, hey, our family’s from Kentucky). I tell you he’s older only because I don’t want you to get the false sense that we grew up together. Rather, I grew up watching him. I was 8 and 9 and 10, for example, when George was on "The Facts of Life" (and believed, as only an 8- and 9- and 10-year-old girl might, that this was a good career move for him).

The Oscar favorite no one really likes

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

I can't be the only person who had a mixed, double reaction to George Clooney's big emotional scene near the end of Alexander Payne's "The Descendants," which seems destined to end up as the also-ran or bridegroom in this year's Oscar race. Wearing his bad haircut, his Hawaiian shirt and his 15 extra pounds as Honolulu lawyer Matt King, Clooney bends over his recumbent wife in her hospital bed, murmuring things to her that I won't specify, in case you haven't seen the movie yet. He calls her "my joy and my pain," lets a quite convincing tear run down his face, and leaves the audience digging for tissues.

Sure, the moment affected me -- but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he's learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he's just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, "Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn't he? I'm supposed to cry, right?"

“The Descendants”: George Clooney’s Oscar-friendly Hawaii vacation

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 01:00:00 +0000

When I covered the premiere of Alexander Payne's bittersweet, Hawaiian-themed comedy-drama "The Descendants" at the Toronto International Film Festival, I largely dodged my own mixed emotions about the film. Instead, I wrote about the evident fact that it may well win George Clooney the leading-role Oscar that has so far eluded him. (Although he's twice been nominated for best actor, in "Michael Clayton" and "Up in the Air" -- and was also nominated for both screenplay and direction with "Good Night, and Good Luck" -- Clooney's only Academy Award so far has come in the supporting category, for "Syriana.") So it's time to come clean and say that "The Descendants" bugs me quite a bit, even as it successfully navigates humor and heartbreak, and ultimately packs a considerable emotional wallop. It's an unusual combination; if a movie can be subtle and clumsy at the same time, "The Descendants" is that movie.