Director Alexander Payne’s interpretation of Kaui Hart Hemming’s debut novel “The Descendants” is excellent. But you already knew that, because the film has been showered in glowing reviews and had taken home serious hardware from the Golden Globes. The characters-imperfect, endearing, lovable, and despicable, often in the same scene-make the film an irresistible human drama.
What I haven’t heard much talk about is the film’s profound environmental themes and their beautifully understated significance. The main plot of the movie follows Matt King (George Clooney) as he deals with both the looming death of his comatose wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), and her newly discovered infidelity. Meanwhile, the primary subplot is that, because he is a descendant of Hawaiian royalty, Matt stands as the sole trustee of an enormous deed of land, land which most of his extended family are pressuring him to sell to developers so everyone can rake in a huge payday. The land is one of the few undeveloped private lots left in Hawaii.
The main plot takes up probably 90% of the movie, as Matt King, his two daughters (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller), and his elder daughter’s bafflingly likable companion Sid (Nick Krause) notify family members and attempt to discover Elizabeth’s lover’s identity. The subplot surfaces only intermittently throughout the film, but the fact that the work’s title references the subplot suggests Hemming intended her audience to consider it closely.
The resolution to the subplot comes near the end of the film, when Matt decides not to sell the land, a move with immeasurably broader repercussions for the environment and the future of the island than their family ordeal could have ever had, although the ordeal has demanded nearly all their attention. Matt is far from a fire-and-brimstone environmentalist, but the agony and duress of his wife’s dramatic death and infidelity have made him ready to accept responsibility for the land he’s inherited. When his cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges) tries to bully him into selling for financially pragmatic reasons, Matt shows uncharacteristic resolve and tells him the land is “something we were supposed to protect,” and then puts Hugh in his place: “…for whatever bullshit reason, I’m the trustee.”
While essentially no American can identify with characters that are inheritors of a dynasty and its claims, more broadly speaking, everyone can identify because we’re all inheritors of what previous generations leave us. Every day, there are less and less pristine places in the world. As surely as Hemming wanted her readers to be engaged by memorable characters and a gripping plotline, she wanted her audience to think about its own role as descendants, as inheritors of the earth.
In the movie’s penultimate scene, Matt and his two daughters are floating offshore and preparing to throw Elizabeth’s ashes into the ocean. Matt looks squarely into the pail filled with his unfaithful wife’s remains, and right before chucking what’s left of her overboard, he mutters, “Well, I guess that’s it.” After everything he and his daughters and the dozen other people involved have been through, the whole thing ends just like that.
Matt chose to stand up to his cousin and everyone else who wanted him to sell off the land because his personal experiences gave him perspective. He saw that no matter how agonizing our human dramas are, how tormented we feel as we attempt to navigate through difficult moral and emotional hellscapes, in the grand scheme they’re nothing more than a bucketful of dust tossed in the ocean. What counts is what we leave behind.
Frank Izaguirre is a writer and ecocritic. He loves writing about nature and the environment, which of course means he barely goes outside to see it anymore. He lives in Miami.