The Descendants

Grade: A-

There are two ways I thought about starting this review. One is about trying to make a poignant point; the other is about things that bother me about reviewing movies. The latter of whom nobody will care about, but I want to mention it because it bothers me. The point is that overall Alexander Payne’s The Descendants is a better movie than Attack the Block, yet I enjoyed Attack the Block more. This isn’t really a problem unless you write about movies and give them an accompanying grade. See I wanted badly to give The Descendants an A- but ultimately I felt like I couldn’t because that would be a better grade then Attack the Block and I didn’t like it more than Attack the Block. So I’m just going to say it’s a better movie, but not nearly as much fun. (ed. – After further consideration I decided to man up and give it an A-)

Okay now on to stuff other people might find interesting. My other point is that The Descendants opens an interesting discussion about how we can’t help but become our parents. We all try, in some way or another, to not become them but in the end we can’t help but end up like them in some way. Often it sucks. It sucks hard. This is mostly because we are too quick to notice how we are like them in the bad ways. We get plenty of great qualities from our parents but they often aren’t the ones that get the most discussion.

In The Descendants, two of the main characters George Clooney’s Matt King and Shailene Woodley’s Alexandra King are plagued by this. Matt is his father, who we are told was an honest and hard working man that while he was born wealthy believed in only using the money he directly earned and raising his children on “enough to do something, but not enough to do nothing.” This lifestyle has worked out for him pretty well. He has a good job that he admits he may work at a bit too much. A wife who while things haven’t been great he still very much loves. He has two daughters. He lives in Hawaii. He also has a giant chunk of land in his family’s name that has been entrusted in him that he plans to sell for a lot of money and split among his many relatives. Things aren’t perfect for Matt but they could be a whole lot worse.

Then all of a sudden they get a lot worse. It all starts when his wife, Elizabeth, gets in a bad boating accident. She hits her head pretty hard, putting her in a comma, and eventually leading to her death. After being told by the doctor that his wife will be passing away in a few days Matt decides to go and tell all of her friends and family to say their last words before she passes away. He starts by getting his teenage daughter Alexandra out of the boarding school she is attending. After showing up and finding her drunk he takes her home to tell her the bad news about her mother. She of course reacts like any teen who hates their parent because they are so much alike. She’s mad and sad and in the course of this she tells father that she caught mom cheating on him.

This, we find out, is why she was really sent away. Matt never knew this because he is as he calls it “the backup parent.” Alexandra and her mother fought constantly as is often the case when two people with as strong of personalities as they both have (because they are the same person) are stuck in confinement with each other long enough. Then Alex saw her mom with another man and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The great thing about Alex, and supposedly her mom, is that this is an extremely realistic character and her actions are spot on. She hates her mom for making her like her and for doing something wrong to her dad who she views as being completely innocent. People like Alex love to grandstand when someone else like them does something bad. Never mind the fact that she herself does wrong things all the time and expects no repercussions. Someone else did wrong and they must be punished. You’re lying to yourself if you don’t know someone like that; well either that or that person is you.

Matt, who is naturally a passive man, takes this news hard and instantly goes on a middle aged tirade looking for the man. Matt is mad and he wants to do something to this man, who he finds out is named Brain Speer (played by Matthew lillard). Matt in an effort to track down Brian is lead to another island in Hawaii where he finally gets a chance to confront Brian. The interesting thing though is that through his travels Matt remembers who he is. Matt is a good man who does the right thing, like his father. So rather than confront Brian to try and fight him, he decides that he owes it to his dying wife to give Brian a chance to say goodbye. Matt wants to be the hard ass who makes Brian hurt as much as he has been hurt, but ultimately that’s not who he is.

The rest I will let you see for yourself, but as I said things basically all go to hell for Matt and the rest of the movie is him figuring out how to put things back into place. There is another side plot about him trying to sell the land. It’s interesting and is the main thing about the movie that is special to a story told in Hawaii as everyone is pushing for Matt to sell the property to a local buyer even if he won’t make as much money in the deal. Hawaii also plays a large role in the movie not just as the backdrop of the story but for interesting moments that make the movie memorable. Like when Matt is in an important meeting with a bunch of his family members about the land and everyone is dressed basically like it’s casual Friday so he says in voice over “don't be fooled by appearances. In Hawaii, some of the most powerful people look like bums and stuntmen.” Or his opening scene narration where he exclaims his distaste for living in Hawaii by saying “Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself.”

Through this the director, Alexander Payne, does a really nice job of accustoming himself to his movies. I mean this in the sense that the views and overall approach to shooting a movie in Hawaii seem realistic to Hawaii. Part of this was probably thanks in large part to the writer of the book Kaui Hart Hemmings being around the set (she plays a cameo role in the movie too), but still you get a sense that Hawaii isn’t just a location but a character in this movie and an accurate one at that. Much like how in The Town you get such a feel for living in that part of Boston that Boston becomes more or less a real character in the movie. I’ve only ever seen one other Payne movie (Sideways) and while I didn’t care for it he definitely gave you the feeling of what it is like to go across the California visiting vineyards.

This movie is also well acted. Clooney does a great job of not being Mr. Handsome and instead playing a regular Joe who it’s believable that he would be cheated on. I’d imagine it’s hard for someone as suave as Clooney to play a man so angry and unassuming, so he did a great job. The anguish when Matt is being told by his step father about how he should have done more for his wife because he doesn’t know she was unfaithful is palpable, and Clooney helps to bring that. Shailene Woodley was also quite impressive. If you have ever seen The Secret Life of the American Teenager I feel sorry for you, and I’m also assuming you didn’t think she had a performance like this in her. Sure she is still playing pouty but this character was much more nuanced and fully formed and a lot of that could have been lost with a lesser actor. In the similar vein, Matthew Lillard doesn’t have a huge part but he is good in what he is in. Going toe to toe with Clooney in the scene he does is no easy feat but he was up to the task. It seems like maybe he has done some growing up since his Scooby Doo days.

I feel like I also have to mention the character Sid at some point in this review as he is the films comic relief. He’s a lovable idiot who Matt can’t stand but Alex keeps around because she needs someone her own age to help her mourn. At first he seems unnecessary and cliché, but as the movie progresses he grows on you and you see his value. Not just as a character but as a person. As a whole The Descendants is sort of like that. At first you think something is just there to happen as part of the story and then it becomes the story. In this way you can definitely tell it was a book first. It doesn’t have a bunch of ups and down and doesn’t really have much of an ending, but by the end of it you have been told a story worth telling. And well told at that.

Win Win

Grade: C+

Thomas McCarthy’s Win Win is a frustrating movie for me. This is because I love Thomas McCarthy movies. While he has only directed two movies prior to this both have been great, and both have very distinctly had his own personal style stamped on them. The Visitor is subtly beautiful and The Station Agent is one of the most likeable movies I’ve ever seen. I don’t have an exact word to describe McCarthy’s previous efforts but I know that they just make me happy in a way that is distinct to both those films. Certainly there are common themes amongst McCarthy films. They are often set in New Jersey, Bobby Cannavale is in most of them, they feature respected actors, they are rather minimalistic, and perhaps best of all they have a heavy foot in reality the likes of which you rarely see in movies. Mix that all up, add some charm and you have a McCarthy film that will leave you grinning from ear to ear.

Win Win had all this, but it just wasn’t the same. I enjoyed it just fine. It’s a fine movie and pretty much all the things I listed above are in it, but it just didn’t have the heart of McCarthy’s previous movies. I wanted it so bad to be just as pitch perfect as his other films, but it just wasn’t, and that bummed me out. So take this review at face value because while I wasn’t too high on it, my opinion is clearly skewed.

The story goes as follows. Paul Giamatti plays a small town lawyer named Mike. Mike has a wife (played by the delightful Amy Ryan), two daughters, and is a high school wrestling coach for a team that is terrible. Mike has two friends. One Stephen (played by Jeffrey Tambor) works with Mike and also helps to coach the wrestling team. His other friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) is a successful businessman who is having troubles coping with his wife leaving him for the construction worker he hired to fix his house. Mike’s problem is that his small town practice is struggling. He’s not making enough money to fix basic things both at his home and at his work. Soon Mike sees an opportunity to help with these problems when ones of his wealthiest clients Mr. Poplar (Burt Young) is in a need of a new guardian. Mr. Poplar is in the early stages of dementia and while he still could live in his home by himself, he would need a guardian that could provide a lot of assistance. Seeing an opportunity to take on the money allotted to the guardian of Mr. Poplar, Mike offers to take on the role, but instead of helping to take care of him Mike just sends him to an old folk’s home while telling Mr. Poplar the judge made him do it.

A wrench gets thrown in this plan though when Mike is going to shut off Mr. Poplar’s pipes at his now empty house. On the doorstep of his place they find a high school aged boy. It turns out the kid is Mr. Poplar’s grandson who traveled all the way from Ohio(the movie is of course set in New Jersey) to escape his in and out of rehab mother. With no other choice Mike and his family are forced to take the kid (his name is Kyle) in. Kyle is an understandably quiet kid who, Mike soon learns, just happens to be a former state runner up for wrestling in the state of Ohio.

The story unfolds like how a lot of sports movies (not to say this is really a sports movie but it sort of is) do from here. Kyle brings new life to the down and out, ragtag bunch. They go from dead last to well… they win like one match, but still it’s progress. Everyone is affected by the new life Kyle brings to the team and for the most part all is well. The problem then starts when Kyle’s mom shows up. I won’t go much farther into the story because you really should go watch this movie if for nothing more than to support people who make good films, but you may be able to guess what kinds of trouble arises from there.

 The person who is most interestingly affected by Kyle’s presence (and leads to my favorite part of this movie) is Terry. After seeing Kyle wrestle (by Googling him) Terry decides to become an assistant coach. Due to his current boredom with his life Terry, instantly becomes way too into the team as well as a little too fond of Kyle. Not in a creepy way, but in an over excited way. See as I said earlier, Terry’s life sucks right now. Sure he has all this cool stuff (as we see from him casually playing Wii in his fancy condo) and money but that’s not what he is interested in. Terry just wants to be like a normal person, and even more importantly Terry just wants his wife back. Everyone else has lives and families, while all Terry has is things. He is the king alone in his castle with nobody to talk to (or for you film buffs: he is Charles Foster Kane alone in Xanadu). He needs the team and even more he needs Kyle to keep winning because those are the only good, human things in his life right now. It’s fun watching the very charismatic Cannavale get way too excited about a high school wrestling match or wear a suit to his first match as an assistant coach because he’s taking things way more seriously than everyone else, but at its heart this character is very real and sad.

In fact that character was just like the kind of characters I have come to expect from McCarthy movies. The problem was the rest of the characters just didn’t meet the same depth. Mike is sort of your typical Joe everyman, and while he is clearly flawed, he just feels too much like your average indie movie lead. Mike’s wife is spunky, fun, and has some fight in her (although a lot of this is because Amy Ryan is very much these things) but she too feels too much like a typical indie movie wife. And Kyle is interesting, but hardly a character you would want to carry a movie. Again, there is nothing wrong with any of these characters. They are better than probably 80% of characters you see in movies, but it just wasn’t on par with the rich characters I’m used to seeing in McCarthy’s other films.

I really hate to be so negative about a film that A. I did like B. is by a director I very much respect and C. has a relatively good and positive message (I mean this is the sense that there should be more strong women characters like Jackie (Mike’s wife) and it is a somewhat uplifting movie with characters you want to route for). It’s just not as good as McCarthy’s other movies, and if you know me you know that I have trouble getting past things like that. So while I gave it a C+, I still think you should definitely watch it and if you like it I can’t suggest McCarthy’s other movies (The Visitor and The Station Agent) enough.

The Lincoln Lawyer

Grade: B-

Redemption, we all want it but very few of us get it. We’ve all have countless instances where we wish we could get that second chance. Sometimes we get that chance and we right what went wrong the first time. Others we simply make a mistake again, and hope to get yet another chance. More often than not we are let down. It’s why we are all so hesitant to offer people redemption, because we have been burned before and nobody wants to be burned again. Of course there are some people we continue to give chances even though there have been no signs of them changing the outcome. We all have at least one person that for whatever reason we can’t deny giving them another opportunity. Whether it’s the out of you league girl who you think one day will date you so you continue to let her walk all over you, or maybe the slick talking cool guy who takes advantage of you then ditches you as soon as something else comes along that you continue to let back into your life when that something else goes away and he wants back in, we all know of one. It helps to reach this point if you have a silver tongue. It helps even more if you are attractive.

Brad Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer was Matthew McConaughey’s shot at redemption. We all loved McConaughey as David Wooderson the creepy yet charming older guy still chasing after high school girls in Dazed and Confused. Sadly from there on out it was all downhill. As is often the case in Hollywood, once they realize that an actor has draw simply off being in a movie they will try to exploit that draw for all it’s worth. They realized women like seeing McConaughey as the handsome and charming male counterpart in romantic comedies and the rest is history. He tried some other more serious roles but ultimately they too fell flat (go watch We Are Marshall and tell me he isn’t doing a terrible George Bush impersonation that whole movie). By 2011 it seemed like America, myself included, had given up on McConaughey.

Insert then The Lincoln Lawyer. On paper this movie wasn’t anything special. A movie from a C-List director based off a book with a title that couldn’t be more literal. I remember seeing the preview and laughing at how ridiculous it seemed while looking forward to another terrible McConaughey performance. But whoever put this movie together was awfully smart about it. They started with a strong script that meant McConaughey didn’t have to carry the film on his acting prowess alone. They also surrounded him with an incredibly impressive supporting cast to force him to step up his game. I mean he spends half this movie interacting with the likes of Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, and Bryan Cranston. Without giving too much away, there is literally a scene where the movie trades heavy interaction with Macy for interactions with Cranston, a worthy handoff to say the least. And Ryan Phillippe may not have much range but he is the Rolls Royce of snobby rich boys in movies.

Add that all up and if McConaughey failed here then you can kiss any credibility he may have had left goodbye. Luckily for him and the viewer, McConaughey made good use of his chance at redemption. He owns this film. He goes toe to toe with some of the best actors in Hollywood and comes out looking like he more than belongs. It helps that this role was tailor made for him, but regardless he stepped up.

Now about the actual film. The story starts out simple. McConaughey is a fast talking lawyer named Mick Haller, who you as you may have guessed from the title, works out of his Lincoln town car. He takes on shady clients and is clearly the best at what he does. He’s also not scared to get his hands dirty as we see by him hustling a local biker gang in the beginning of the film. What makes this movie good is that this is all brought on as pulp. This isn’t a movie acting in complete earnestness. It is well aware of how cliché it seems and it does a nice job of owning what it is. In some ways it is to lawyer movies what Machete was trying to be for mex-sploitation movies, only it works as an entertaining lawyer movie as well. I talk a lot about how much it annoys me when a movie clearly has a bad script. This was a movie with a good script.

Mick soon finds out that he has been requested to work on the case of the son of a rich real estate tycoon. The son Louis Roulet, played by Ryan Phillippe, is going to trial for assault on a girl he met at a club. Of course he claims he didn’t do it. What happens then is that Mick actually begins to believe his case even though the evidence and to a lesser extent his private investigator played by William H. Macy very much so begs to differ. See as we soon find out, Mick while being a bit of a dirty attorney still has a proper sense of justice. He fears nothing more than not letting an innocent man go. So as Roulet’s story starts to make some sense Mick feels more and more compelled to make sure he gets things right.

The problem is that he ends up doing his job a bit too well and uncovers some things that his client would not like people to know. As it turns out though Roulet was sort of expecting him to discover this information all along, and ends up putting Mick at a serious moral dilemma as his attorney. This all plays out very interestingly in the long court room scenes towards the end of the movie. If that sounded vague it is, and for good reason, as it’s more interesting to see how things play out in this movie than for me to just tell you. You can tell a movie has a good story when people who see it aren’t interested in telling you the story and would rather have you experience it for yourself. Saying “I don’t want to ruin it for you" is a good thing because it implies that there is something to ruin.

The direction of this movie also does a nice job at complimenting the movies strengths and not getting in the way. It’s shot with a lot of shaky cam so if that really bothers you it might be best to stay away, but it helps to give this film a gritty feel that couldn’t be more appropriate. Furman does a nice job of doing just enough so as to not take away from the movies strengths (its script and its acting). The cinematography is also rather solid but again in a minimalistic way. They don’t want you to feel like you are watching a movie. Instead they want you to get caught up in the story and the world they have created in it.

There isn’t much else to say about this movie. It’s a good lawyer/crime thriller that I really wish we would see more movies like. It’s enjoyable because it knows what it is and doesn’t try to be too much. It’s not groundbreaking and won’t win awards, but it operates within its genre superbly. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us all of why we liked Matthew McConaughey to begin with.