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"  George Clooney may or may not be a melancholy man, but he sure can play one in the movies, whether it&amp;#039;s the fed-up fixer in Michael Clayton, the gobsmacked lonely guy in Up in the Air, or the compromised idealist in The Ides of March. Luckily for him, and us, he&amp;#039;s also immensely funny on screen and off.  That potent combination of sadness and an \u00ADirrepressible sense of the absurd lurking within it transforms screenwriter-director Alexander Payne&amp;#039;s The \u00ADDescendants into an unsentimental film that can still make you cry. Clooney is Matt King, the head of two \u00ADfamilies: One is a sprawling Anglo-Hawaiian dynasty whose members, if Matt gives the go-ahead, stand to make a \u00ADfortune by selling their centuries-old inheritance, an \u00ADunblemished 25,000-acre spread on famously beautiful Kauai; the other is a trio of problematic females\u2014Matt&amp;#039;s wild, daredevil wife, Elizabeth \u00AD(Patricia Hastie), lying comatose in the hospital after a boating accident, and their daughters, 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley) and 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller), who drop F-bombs on their \u00ADfather in endless punishing salvos. The land on Kauai is a \u00ADgorgeous metaphor for the ties that bind families\u2014and what it means to clip them. The \u00ADfamily within the clan embodies those ties, seen in intimate close-up and stressed to the breaking point.  Payne won the adapted-screenplay Oscar for his last movie, 2004&amp;#039;s marvelous antiromance Sideways, and should collect more glittering prizes with this one. But The Descen\u00ADdants also reflects the boldness that put Payne on the map with 1996&amp;#039;s Citizen Ruth, a scabrous social comedy about abortion. The Descendants is no Terms of Endearment (as good as that teary film is); even as it \u00ADpoignantly captures the drawn-out torment of prospective loss, what that loss exposes is nothing less than a comic call to arms.  The mischievous tone of this movie is set as an overwhelmed Matt makes his way home from the hospital through heavy \u00ADtraffic in a Honolulu so overbuilt with business towers and high-rise condos that the famous majesty of Hawaii&amp;#039;s corrugated lava mountains is completely obscured. Musing grimly on Elizabeth&amp;#039;s deteriorating condition, he finally snarls, &amp;quot;Paradise? Paradise can go fuck itself!&amp;quot;\u2014at which point you can&amp;#039;t help feeling that there&amp;#039;s probably worse to come. And of course, there is: Families are \u00ADveritable \u00ADfactories of worse-to-come. (Did I mention that when we meet Alex, she&amp;#039;s sneaking out of her boarding school for \u00ADtroubled kids to party with friends?) Payne repeatedly \u00ADreverts to the tragic state of Matt&amp;#039;s wife and in flashback glimpses lets us see her in all her reckless glory. But the \u00ADengine that drives The Descen\u00ADdants is much more entertaining: Matt&amp;#039;s mortifying \u00ADdiscovery that she had been cheating on him, up to the very \u00ADmoment of her dire accident. That he&amp;#039;s the last to know\u2014and has to hear it from his older daughter\u2014confirms the girls&amp;#039; complaint that he retreats into his work at the \u00ADexpense of his family. Payne is also showing us the unhappy fractures in this ostensibly good marriage. Horribly funny is a Payne specialty: Witness the infamous scene in Sideways when Sandra Oh beats the bejesus out of Thomas Haden Church with her motorcycle helmet after learning that he&amp;#039;s not just two-timing her, he&amp;#039;s about to get \u00ADmarried. It&amp;#039;s hard to imagine that Payne could top that scene, but he does, with something longer and more \u00ADintricate, when Matt, accompanied by an \u00ADinsistent Alex, \u00ADdecides to confront his wife&amp;#039;s erstwhile \u00ADlover\u2014at the lover&amp;#039;s home, no less. Finely played by \u00ADMatthew \u00ADLillard, he&amp;#039;s a surprisingly ordinary Joe, an outclassed if stalwart local realtor named Brian. Watching him, you can only imagine how Elizabeth must have ripped through his life like a sexual cyclone, and now here&amp;#039;s Matt the thunder god come to complete the chaos. But everyone, including Judy Greer as Brian&amp;#039;s sweet wife, is great in this appalling but delicious set piece, which works so well because nothing about it is exaggerated. On the contrary, it&amp;#039;s so real you almost feel guilty for watching.  That mix of transgression and restraint isn&amp;#039;t just a specialty of Payne&amp;#039;s: It&amp;#039;s his signature, one rare enough that there was palpable relief at the \u00ADToronto film festival when The Descendants turned up to close the seven-year gap since Sideways, another funny movie laced with hurt. The comedy Payne excels at is the human kind, which can\u2014and inevitably does\u2014turn to tragedy in a blink. In the end, what else is there for us but love and death? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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