By WARREN DAY

“The Descendants” with George Clooney has the mixed-blessing of being an Oscar front-runner for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and will probably get nominations in other categories, such as Best Supporting Actress.

Why is such a thing a mixed-blessing?

It’s a rather common hiccup in the award season – where we’re now entering the home stretch – that the movie that gets the big buzz too early grows stale with too much chatter and the voters turn to something fresher on their radar. This happened two years ago with another Clooney film, “Up in the Air,” and it happened last year with “The Social Network.”

It would be a great shame if this befell “The Descendants,” because it achieves something far more special than multi-million dollar special effects could ever do. It’s as funny as life can be at its messiest, and as emotionally moving as it can be at its best. It isn’t so much a movie you watch as a story you live. And how often can you say that?

A disheveled George Clooney plays a work-obsessed lawyer in Hawaii who’s also the sole trustee for a family trust that owns 25,000 acres of pristine beach property due to the fact he’s a direct descendant of one of the first white landowners (who also married a princess of the once Hawaiian royal house). It’s a fortune-for-the-taking and a group of wide-eyed cousins are pressuring him to cash in.

It’s also one of the reasons he’s been a neglectful husband and father, calling himself “the backup parent, the understudy.”

And then, at the beginning of the movie, his wife is involved in a boating accident off Waikiki beach that leaves her in a coma, and he must deal with two daughters and a spouse that it turns out he barely knows or understands. What follows is both one of the best comedies and one of the best dramas of this or any year.

“The Descendants” is a movie about fractured connections in our past and in our present, situations we allow to continue because either we’re distracted by other things, or more likely, because we’re at a loss to know what to do about them. Then something happens and we are forced to reach across gaps that have grown between those we love and those for whom we bear some responsibility. Almost none of us have been big landowners in Hawaii or anywhere else, but most of us have been involved with broken connections to one degree or another.

The majority of today’s movies give us highly exaggerated versions of both heroes and villains, so it can come as something of a shock (and a welcomed relief) to see genuinely real people in real life situations. Or have we become so desensitized by the bombast of action movies and frat-boy comedies that we can’t respond to a life-size story?

You may not notice how great a performance Clooney is giving until you realize how different a character he’s playing from himself – a bewildered parent and cuckold husband who’s totally inept in dealing with females of any age.  Hollywood usually rewards more showy roles, but it’s the subtleties and shadings that demand the best acting and here Clooney really delivers.  He doesn’t tell you what he feels, but rather his face and body language shows you what’s going on inside his character with all its complexities and contradictions.

And it’s a performance that fits into a talented ensemble cast, with the wonderful Shailene Woodley as his rebellious 17 year-old daughter, whose acting reminds you how seldom you see an authentic adolescent in the movies. It’s the kind of story where the characters break out of their stereotypes and surprise you, as so often happens in real life.

And Hawaii itself breaks out of its stereotype, for Alexander Payne, the director and co-writer, shows you not only the picture postcard side, but also the traffic jams, the crowded Honolulu skyline, the rainy overcast days, and the tacky restaurants.

Whereas most Hollywood movies are filled with big moments that in the end mean little – explosions, car chases, trucks transforming into robots, teenage hunks turning into werewolves (the latter two with much the same result), and frantic battles to the death with magic wands — Alexander Payne has a talent for finding the little moments that have big meanings to his characters and to anyone in the audience with an ounce of empathy. His movies are road trips of the soul.

The very last scene in “The Descendants” is a simple and ordinary one, but in the context of this ever-deepening story with its ever-developing characters, it’s a wallop to the heart that leaves you lifted and hopeful.

In the most emotional moments neither Payne nor Clooney go for sentimentality, but instead for a saving grace, and that’s as amazing in a movie as it is in life.

Photos courtesy, Ad Hominem Enterprises

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