The Descendants.

I’ve been less motivated to watch all of the 2011 nominees for Best Picture than I was the previous year, with a few films in this year’s batch in which I have absolutely zero interest (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) and the winner, The Artist failing to meet expectations for me – to say nothing of the time I’ve spent watching rookie league games the last two months. I finally got around to watching The Descendants this weekend, and I’m struggling to find a credible reason why it wouldn’t beat out The Artist in a fair fight, one based strictly on the quality of the films rather than what I presume was a nostalgia move.

George Clooney plays the starring role as Matt King, a successful Hawaiian attorney whose wife, Elizabeth, suffers a serious boating accident at the start of the film, leaving her comatose and eventually without hope of recovery. Matt’s two daughters, the wayward Alexandra and the sassy Scottie, were already struggling before the accident, and the situation is made worse when Alexandra informs her father that Elizabeth had been having an affair. This revelation launches Matt, with Alexandra’s help, on a quixotic quest to identify and confront the man who has cuckolded him, only to find that he, too, has a family likely to be devastated if the adultery is unearthed. It’s clear as this storyline unfolds that this is not only Matt’s way of dealing with his two-headed grief, but a way that his remaining family nucleus can come back together and try to heal as a single unit, rather than three individuals drifting apart on a sea of sorrow and hurt.

None of the film’s characters, even side characters like Alexandra’s sort-of-boyfriend Sid, ends up one-dimensional, a rare trick in a movie with this many people in pivotal roles. The film could easily have demonized Elizabeth’s paramour, and while he’s hardly a good guy, he’s more than just a dark presence around the story’s periphery. Elizabeth’s father similarly appears with a purpose but with a severe underlying pain that governs his anger towards Matt and Alexandra, anger that presents Matt with a difficult decision near the end of the film. I had a little trouble with Judy Greer as the oblivious wife of Elizabeth’s lover, although that was primarily because every time she talked, I pictured Cheryl from Archer (whom Greer voices brilliantly).

The movie’s subplot, however, has all of the sentiment and overstatement that the main plot lacks. Matt is the sole executor of the trust overseeing the 25,000 acres of “pristine” land on Kauai that must be sold before the trust dissolves in seven years, and most of the various cousins involved in the trust want to sell out to a developer who’ll build a resort, golf course, and and other commercial properties, making the cousins instant millionaires. I doubt I need to explain what course Matt ends up taking, although the film offers minimal explanation for it beyond his soliloquy at the time he makes it (in which he acknowledges that he has no immediate solution to the problem caused by the rule against perpetuities); the parallel between his attempt to save the land and his newfound attention to the consequences of his actions and his similar efforts to save what remians of his family is obvious and forced, the one false note in a film that otherwise succeeds on how often it feels true.

George Clooney excels in the role of Matt, although I did find it hard to accept one of the most famous actors in the world in this sort-of-everyman role – doesn’t everyone around Matt realize he looks a lot like George Freaking Clooney? – and the attempts to frump him up a little, like tucking in his shirts, greying his hair, making him run oddly in flip-flops, and so on, only emphasized the disconnect between the character and the actor, much like Cary Grant in his final film role, Walk, Don’t Run. Clooney is at the point in his career where any performance in a serious film that isn’t worthy of an Oscar nomination is a surprise, so I was far more taken by the performance of Shailene Woodley, making her feature-film debut as Alexandra, who begins the film away at a reform school where she’s supposed to be getting help with substance-abuse issues. Her character develops far more over the course of the film, sometimes in mildly surprising ways, as she goes from spoiled, snotty, justifiably-angry daughter to her father’s main emotional supporter and partner-in-crime. Woodley had to show more range than any other actor in The Descendants, from the heartbreaking scene where she learns that her mother isn’t going to recover to the just-as-heartbreaking scenes at the end where the family says goodbye – delivering subtle grace notes like her movements as she brings her younger sister into their mother’s room – enough that I’m surprised she didn’t receive more attention come awards season. With that kind of ability and the requisite beauty (Hollywood accepts no less), Woodley looks like a star in the making.

Of the four Best Picture nominees I’ve seen so far, I’d put The Descendants on top, ahead of Hugo, which I loved but which didn’t have the subtlety of The Descendants and relied more on fantasy to drive its main plot forward. That’s not necessarily bad, but I think it’s harder to make a great film while trying to keep the characters and story firmly grounded in reality, and of course The Descendants couldn’t fill space with special effects or long flashback sequences. The Descendants also found significant humor in the cracks between the darker sequences in the film. Both movies make The Artist look like paper-thin in comparison.