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Published on March 13, 2012
Going Nowhere: “The Descendants” and “Young Adult”
Just released on DVD, The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s long-awaited followup to
Sideways, and Young Adult, a second collaboration between the writer–director team of
Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody (who worked together on Juno), both present characters who
travel at a time of personal crisis. Where do these journeys take a middle-aged father and a
no-longer-young, hedonistic fiction writer? In the latest installment of his “Fisher Reviews”
web-exclusive column, Mark Fisher argues that in their different ways both The
Descendants and Young Adult forgo the feelgood factor. (The Descendants is released on
DVD by Fox Searchlight, Young Adult by Paramount.)
Alexander Payne’s The Descendants and Jason Reitman’s Young Adult offer contrasting
stories about going nowhere.
The settings for the non-journeys in the two films couldn’t be more different. The
Descendants is set in Hawaii, while Young Adult centers on Mercury, a nondescript
Minnesota small town. In The Descendants, lawyer Matt King (George Clooney) takes
a tour of the islands in an attempt to come to terms with the imminent death of his
wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), who has been put into a coma by a powerboating
accident. In Young Adult, Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron), a ghost writer of a failing
series of books for the demographic that gives the film its title, travels from
Minneapolis on a whim in a pathetic bid to rekindle a relationship with her now
happily married teenage sweetheart, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), who still lives in
Mercury.
The Descendants. Photo: Merie Wallace. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight.
Comatose Elizabeth is the still center of The Descendants. Matt comes to recognize
the poverty of his relationship with her at the same time as he is agonizing over a
decision about a tract of unspoilt land on the island of Kaua’i which he controls
through a family trust that is due to expire in seven years. The two stories converge
when Matt finds out that Elizabeth was having an affair with a realtor who stands to
benefit from the development of the land. King articulates his decision not to sell
the land in terms of a desire to reconnect with his Hawaiian ancestors, but the film
is more concerned with Matt’s reconnection with his two daughters. From being
the “back-up” (as he says at one point), Matt assumes the role of sole parent, and
The Descendants ends with the three of them relaxing in front of a film at home.
For all the big themes here—marriage, mortality, ancestry—The Descendants has an
oddly inconsequential quality. After the initial revelations about Elizabeth’s
infidelity, we don’t learn much of any significance. Certainly, we don’t learn too
much about Matt, and neither does he: this is no journey of self-discovery. As Peter
Bradshaw argued in his review in the Guardian, Matt is not a character who
undergoes the kind of fictional crises that add to an impression of psychological
depth: “this is an alpha male, wealthy, powerful and someone who, despite his
supposed failings as a husband and father, is seen to behave well on screen and has
a basic claim on our sympathies that is never seriously challenged by the action
of the film.” The discontent which presumably led to Elizabeth’s infidelity is never
seriously broached, leaving us to conclude that Elizabeth was selfish and hedonistic.
It’s as if The Descendants wants to be deflationary and uplifting at the same time.
(The uncertain mood is reinforced by the strange specificity of the premise: a man
whose wife is in a coma while he is deciding whether to sell inherited land—we can
all relate to that, right?) Despite beginning with a moment of attempted
demythologization, with Matt in voiceover rejecting the image of Hawaii as a
paradise from which all suffering has been expunged, The Descendants ends up
presenting, if not being swept away by, just the kind of sublime landscape views
that contribute to the picturesque mythology of the islands. The film has a
strangely muted quality, a curious air of pointlessness. It’s as if Payne couldn’t
decide whether or not to subvert the clichéd idea of an “emotional journey.”
The Descendants. Courtesy of Fox Searchlight.
Young Adult definitely does want to undermine the idea, and it’s both more savage
and more funny than The Descendants. It’s like a desublimated Sweet Home Alabama.
While that 2002 Reese Witherspoon vehicle turned on the super-stark contrast
between high-pressure New York high life and the restrictive-but-ultimatelynurturing country life down South, Young Adult’s horizons only extend as far as
Minnesota. And while Mavis heads to Mercury with every intention of learning to
love the virtues of small-town life, this is beyond her. From the start, it’s clear that
no matter how discontented Mavis may be in the city, there’s neither revelation nor
redemption to be discovered in the place where she grew up but which is no longer
home. Nothing has changed in Mercury, except that it has become even more of a
non-place than it ever was. Gary notes that the town has has “a KenTacoHut now”—
Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, all under one roof.