CHICAGO – Excelsior! Comic book legend Stan Lee’s famous exclamation puts a fine point on the third and final play of Mark Pracht’s FOUR COLOR TRILOGY, “The House of Ideas,” presented by and staged at City Lit Theater in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood. For tickets/details, click HOUSE OF IDEAS.
Film Review: George Clooney Stars in Stunning ‘The Descendants’
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CHICAGO – If one looks solely at the central male characters, it can seem remarkably easy to classify Alexander Payne’s movies under the subgenre heading of “mid-life crisis comedies”: Jim McAllister (“Election”), Warren Schmidt (“About Schmidt”), Miles (“Sideways”), and now the memorable protagonist of his stellar new dramedy “The Descendants,” Matt King. But these characters are also among the most three-dimensional and fully-defined of the comedy genre in the last twenty years. Payne goes deeper than the cliché of the male mid-life crisis to find what’s real and relatable to people at any time in their lives. His latest is a stunning tightrope act of comedy, sentimentality, drama, and the character definition that can only come from a man who has spent his life observing the complexity of the human race.
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“The Descendants” opens with a woman on the water (and is wonderfully book-ended in that respect by the penultimate to the film). An off-screen tragedy puts that woman, Elizabeth King (Patricia Hastie), in a hospital bed, deep in a coma and looking less likely that she’s going to come out of it by the day. While her emotionally-reserved husband Matt (George Clooney) deals with the grief surrounding his wife’s likely death, he is struck by a series of even-further life-changing situations.
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First, Matt realizes that he doesn’t have the skill set to take care of his daughters – younger Scottie (Amara Miller) and older Alexandra (Shailene Woodley). It’s not that he can’t develop it, but they’ve clearly never been close to their dad and the fact that they have to be so now through tragedy makes it an even rougher sea to cross. In particular, Alexandra seems to be rebelling against all authority, even bringing home a boyfriend (Nick Krause), seemingly just to annoy dear old dad even more. She knows this guy’s not in her league but it pisses dad off, so he needs to stay.
One of the reasons for family drama with Alexandra comes to the surface when she reveals that she caught her mother cheating on Matt before the accident. Matt is dumbfounded. How do we react to infidelity when the person who betrayed us is on life support? Feeling like it’s the right thing to do, but also clearly to get a good look at the guy himself, Matt and his daughters begin a journey to track down the man who might have broken up their happy home if fate hadn’t stepped in.
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The Descendants
Photo credit: Fox Searchlight