From Alexander Payne, the creator of the Oscar-winning ‘Sideways’, ‘The Descendants’ is set in Hawaii and follows the unpredictable journey of an American family at a crossroads.

Matt King (George Clooney), a husband and father of two girls, must re-examine his past and navigate his future when his wife is in a boating accident off Waikiki. He awkwardly attempts to repair his relationship with his daughters — 10 year-old precocious Scottie (Amara Miller) and rebellious 17 year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) — while wrestling with a decision to sell his family‘s land.

Handed down from Hawaiian royalty and missionaries, the Kings own some of the last priceless virgin parcels of tropical beach in the islands. When Alexandra drops the bombshell that her mother was in the midst of a romantic fling at the time of the accident, Matt has to take a whole new look at his life, not to mention his legacy, during a week of momentous decisions.

With his girls in tow, he embarks on a haphazard search for his wife‘s lover. Along the way, in encounters alternately funny, troublesome and transcendent, he realizes he‘s finally on course toward rebuilding his life and family.

“My friends on the mainland think because I live in Hawaii, I live in paradise. Like a permanent vacation, we’re all just out here drinking Mai Tais, shaking our hips and catching waves. Are they nuts?” — Matt King.

George Clooney‘s Matt King joins the characters of Alexander Payne‘s previous films as a flawed individual finding his way through a world of lunacy, bittersweet emotion and surprises; he is neither a hero nor anti-hero. Like Matthew Broderick‘s envious teacher in ‘Election’, Jack Nicholson‘s glass-half-empty retiree in ‘About Schmidt’, and Paul Giamatti‘s muddling, middle-aged wine country tourist in Sideways, King is not the man he would like to be.

His mischievous daughters don‘t trust him, his imperiled wife has been cheating on him and his broke cousins see him and the land trust he controls as a piggy bank. To add insult to injury, he‘s surrounded by a lush, fertile, awe-inspiring landscape that defies his inner turmoil.

Yet all of this leads Matt to a tumultuous awakening that might be awkward, comical and sometimes absurd, but nevertheless changes his concept of love, fatherhood and what it truly takes to be a man. Alexander Payne has always been drawn to these peculiar situations in everyday life that can be experienced as comical, devastating and revealing all in the same breath.

When he read Kaui Hart Hemmings‘ acclaimed debut novel, The Descendants, he was immediately lured by its sharp contrasts. Here was a portrait of a man grappling with some of the worst news, most difficult people, and most impossible decisions of his life. “The novel appealed to me because it‘s an emotional story unfolding in an exotic locale,” Payne says. “It‘s a story that perhaps could be told anywhere, but what made the book for me was its completely unique setting among the landed upper-classes in Hawaii. It‘s very specific to this place, yet it is also universal.

“On a filmmaking level, it was very interesting to me because I‘ve never seen a filmic Honolulu. We see New York, Chicago, L.A., Miami and Seattle, but this is a region we never see in films. There‘s a whole distinctive social fabric to life in Hawaii and that intrigued me. I love films with a specific sense of place. I started making movies in Omaha, then I went to Santa Barbara and now I have ended up in Hawaii.”

Hemmings was able to entwine Hawaiian culture into her story of a bewildered man lurching towards redemption because she herself grew up in a not-so-conventional Hawaiian family, as the stepdaughter of well-known champion surfer and local politician Fred Hemmings, Jr.

When she started writing short stories, she began entwining themes of family, soil, history and inheritance. The Descendants began as a short story (published as The Minor Wars), which Hemmings started writing in the voice of youngest daughter Scottie, but decided to take a daring leap for a young, female writer into Matt King‘s middle-aged, male POV.

The risk changed everything. The story, and then the novel, were no longer just about a clan of fierce individualists doing their own thing but about a father learning to hang on to his family. “As soon as I switched into Matt‘s voice, the story found its rhythm,” Hemmings recalls. “There was so much at stake for him.” Those stakes gave the novel‘s title a double meaning, referring not only to King‘s comic descent but also to his discovery of what it really means to be a Hawaiian descendant and what his own descendants mean to him.

Hemmings created Matt to reflect a distinct subset of the Hawaiian populace, a generation who trace their births back to the intermarriages of white missionaries and landowners with native Hawaiian royalty and their wealth back to the spoils of the colonial Hawaiian plantation system. As Matt explains, his great-great-grandmother was Princess Margaret Ke‘alohilani, one of the last direct descendants of King Kamehameha, who fell in love with her haole (Hawaiian for white or foreign) banker, Edward King, leading to Matt‘s current life as a Honolulu lawyer with deep, tangled roots in the islands.

Like many Hawaiians, he is a hapa-haole, or half-white, who has never quite come to terms with his cultural identity. This gave Hemmings‘ novel another layer, because underneath Matt‘s worries not only about what his wife has been doing behind his back or how he‘s going to raise his daughters, but about how his life might be seen by his Hawaiian ancestors, or his own descendants.

The book, published in 2009, was an instant hit with critics, with the New Yorker praising the way — Hemmings channels the voice of her befuddled middle-aged hero with virtuosity, as he teeters between acerbic and sentimental, scoffing at himself even as he grasps for redemption.

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About the author

Claudia Sondergaard
Specialised in American foreign policy media discourse, I have a real passion for media and writing and feel comfortable in subjects such as human rights, politics, environment, social issues, movies, TV and books. Reporting from Denmark. Follow me @swirlgirlversus

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