Celluloid Widowers

I finally caught The Descendants on DVD the other day, and fairly underwhelming as it was, two thoughts came to me as its first act unfolded.

The first, and more minor of these, concerned the oeuvre of the film's director Alexander Payne. It's been years since I saw Election, which I don't remember much of except the fact that I enjoyed it quite a bit: darkly comical, with very good performances by Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon, an actress whose not inconsiderable pulchritude, a friend of mine once claimed, derived in large part from her wildly flaring nostrils. Also, props to Payne for his attempts to revive that most Kurosawian of punctuations, the wipe cut. But I digress ...

I skipped About Schmidt when it came out, either through carelessness or a seasonal allergy to Jack Nicholson performances, I forget which. I also skipped Payne's next film, Sideways, about a road trip to wineries, because the only way I'm going to watch a film about a man visiting wineries is if the South Australia Tourist Board kidnaps me, straps me to a chair, and goes all Clockwork Orange on me glazzies.

But back to The Descendants. Payne follows up a story of vineyard ramblings with the story of Mike King (George Clooney), a Hawaiian lawyer managing a family land trust, a premise which probably brings the likes of Peter Costello into the sort of raptures that Filipinas wielding chainsaws induce in Quentin Tarantino. If this trend of boojy whiteness continues, in a few years Payne's going to make Woody Allen look like Ken Loach.

Of course, there's more to The Descendants than the joys of seeing George Clooney in suburban lawyer bad trousers (and, damn his handsome soul if he doesn't look good even in Dockers). The land deal financial drama takes place alongside the grander strife of King's marital woes, as he copes with the news that his now comatose wife had been cheating on him. It's not long into the film before we learn that Mrs King's got no chance of waking up, an unsurprising turn of events because, as my wife suggested, if you won't come out of a coma for George Clooney, there's not much modern medicine can do for you.


But this matter brings me to my second point, an observation on a more important Hollywood trend. What is it with all the dead wives? I get how the mourning leading man readily produces a crisis that's a good starting off point for any number of (melo)dramatic plot turns, but I think there's a prevalence to this symptom that requires some careful attention. Just off the top of my head, there's The Descendants and Pixar's Up--damn if that romance montage doesn't get me misted up every time--and, it seems, just about every film that Clint Eastwood has starred in. "Dirty" Harry Callahan is, famously, an itchy-trigger finger widower, and the Unforgiven's William Munny is an ex-gunfighter and widower whose pathological mourning leads Morgan Freeman to coyly suggest there might be some therapeutic benefits in Wild West Wankery.  A few years before Clooney donned his Descendants Dockers, old Clint rocked the daggy widower pants to good effect in Gran Torino. I can't remember if Clint was a widower in Million Dollar Baby, but it's significant that he's estranged from his adult daughter and can only find unofficial family love, in the form of his relationship with stand-in daughter Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank). Morgan Freeman also costars in Million Dollar Baby, but makes no mention of self-love this time. 


Clooney does give a great performance in The Descendants, even if his auratic film star beauty means that he's not quite as convincing as he could be in the role (a similar problem plagued Angelina Jolie's great performance in the Clint Eastwood directed The Changeling). Clooney's Matt King admits that he's always been the "back-up parent" (shades of Homer Simpson's defensive response to Marge's insistence that he look after their children: "But I'm their father!"), too busy with his career blah blah blah. In an essay on fatherhood, Thomas Laqueur cited Freud's claim that there's a parallel between monotheistic religions and patriarchy: both value the unseen and unempirical, against the very tangible evidence of matriarchy and the animistic worship of nature. The father is (or should be) transcendent, and we're not quite sure what to do with him when he has to actually get his hands dirty and do some real parenting. It'd be so much easier if we could get mum out of the way, and then we wouldn't have to deal with her nagging about making the bed or insisting there be vegetables with every meal. It'd be so much easier if she just wasn't around, and easier still if the real kids weren't around, and if we had to do anything to earn our keep we could just lend a hand with the neighbourhood Hmongs or the hillbilly she-boxers. 


In The Descendants Clooney at least has to take care of his own children, who will probably be kept in line by the sheer power of his silver haired and chiseled jaw force field. The ending looks happy enough: Clooney and his two daughters, on the couch watching the doting penguin fathers of March of the Penguins, a documentary narrated by the honey-voiced Morgan Freeman, who, if I recall correctly, has some saucy suggestions for keeping warm in those cold Antarctic winters.