The Descendants

Dramatic tension.

It’s the name of the game. The most fundamental building block of drama, more fundamental even than conflict.

Dramatic. Tension.

If the outcome of a scene, subplot, or overall story is uncertain, and if it matters, then we’re hooked. And if it keeps being uncertain, and keeps mattering, we’ll stay hooked. We’ll watch your two-hour movie with unwavering attention.

We may not love it. We may not remember it. But we’ll watch.

And that gives you, the filmmaker, time and opportunity to unspool thoughts on character, setting, theme and whatever else is bouncing around that cranium of yours.

But you’d better bring the dramatic tension.

Sadly, the new George Clooney movie, The Descendants, has not the slightest whiff of dramatic tension anywhere in it.

The story follows a middle-aged father of two who lives in Hawaii, has a wife in a coma, and is debating to whom he should sell his family’s historic – and immensely valuable – stretch of seafront property.

Clooney soon learns his wife will never come out of her coma. The doctors will have to pull the plug on her, so it’s up to Clooney to tell the rest of his extended family and make preparations for the funeral.

This entails bringing back daughter Alexandra from boarding school. Alexandra’s a misbehaving seventeen year-old brat – at first – and she only adds to Clooney’s woes.

But she does the plot a valuable service by revealing an early secret, and plot-driver: Clooney’s wife, it turns out, had been cheating on him.

The movie treats this revelation like it’s the shocker of the century, but in dramatic terms it’s pretty humdrum. After all, we’ve never even met the wife, and from what we can tell of Clooney, his law practice comes first anyway. Who cares if his wife – who is dead now and out of the story – was cheating or not?

Unfortunately, the Clooney character cares. He wants to discover the identity of his dead wife’s secret lover. He spends much of the movie trying to do so, with the help of Alexandra and her dim-witted boyfriend Sid, and with younger daughter Scottie tagging along, oblivious.

The investigation is haphazard and meandering, interrupted frequently with visits to various cousins – which comprise the real estate subplot – visits to his wife’s parents, and other tangents.

Mercifully, the relationship between Clooney and Alexandra thaws, and they become allies in the search for the dead wife’s secret lover. This reduces the annoyance factor of bickering co-leads, but it doesn’t do anything for the overall problem: the lack of urgency and stakes in the plot.

As befits a pointless quest, the discovery of the secret lover is anti-climactic. He’s just a normal doofus, a married real estate agent who happens to have a stake in Clooney’s upcoming land deal.

This makes Clooney rethink selling the land at all. He finds a sudden moral center, and decides that Hawaii itself will be better off if the land is not developed at all. As a cousin tells him, however, all he can do is slow down the sale of the land, not prevent it entirely.

So even that plot has no real consequences.

The Descendants tries hard to be a movie about real life, filled with real characters in real(-ish) situations. The trouble with this, as always, is that real life makes for bad drama. Dramatic authenticity must come from capturing the spirit of everyday life, not the form of it.

Because the form of it really sucks.

And so, ultimately, does The Descendants. Don’t listen to what the critics will say about this movie. They will give it plaudits merely for not having special effects or car chases. But there’s more to artistic achievement than that. You have to have scenes and subplots that are the emotional equivalent of special effects and car chases.

You have to have dramatic tension!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 26/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 24/100