New York Film Festival 2011

[Chris Knipp]

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR: THE SKIN I LIVE IN (2011)


ELENA ANAYA IN THE SKIN I LIVE IN

Beautiful surfaces

[w a r n i n g: . . .p o s s i b l e ... s p o i l e r s]

"Austere" is how Almodóvar describes the style he strove for in his new film, The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) whose story of an unscrupulous plastic surgeon who creates a forced sex change to simultaneously "replace" his lost wife and avenge the rape of his daughter evokes B-horror. "Austere" may sound pretty ironic given the lush beauty of the images, the intensity of the music, the rich, beautifully lit sets, and the handsome actors elegantly dressed by Paco Delgado, working with Jean Paul Gaultier. But in this film, whose screenplay is adapted from Mygale, a noir novel by the French writer Thierry Jonquet, Almodóvar does hold back a measure of his usual humor, jaunty color, and over-the-top campiness. Although there are moments, as when a husky man in a cat suit bares his ass for a surveillance camera so his mother will recognize him, that are absurd and funny. Antonio Banderas, who starred in the director's earliest films, is back, at 51, looking every inch the glossy but slightly over-the-hill B-picture leading man and exercising impeccable restraint as the evil co-protagonist.

"Strange," "twisted," and "surreal" are words that have been applied to Jonquet's novel. Almodóvar has beautifully elaborated and elucidated that original and removed some of the rougher and more poignant elements. As he retells it, the tale gradually reveals its secrets so the revelations are satisfying rather than surprising and odd rather than moving, though the film's images themselves at times provide an exquisite pleasure. Jonquet's very short novel is ingeniously plotted. At the heart of it, as retold here, is a beautiful woman who is kept prisoner and who hates her victimizer but somehow cannot break away from him. It's a gender-bending sado-masochistic tale. A plastic surgeon loses his wife in a car accident in which she is terribly burned. She lives a while, but as her doctor husband is trying to save her, sees her charred, mutilated skin in a mirror and is so horrified she throws herself out the window. A daughter, psychologically delicate, is raped by a young man at a party where they are both high on drugs, hers medicinal, his recreational. She subsequently goes mad and throws herself out the window too. The young rapist works with puppets and with women's dresses and has a feminine side. The doctor kidnaps him and over a six-year period, transforms him into a beautiful woman who resembles his lost wife -- and has a skin that is impervious to fire. Needless to say, the relationship between doctor and imprisoned patient is uncomfortable, and it becomes strangely ambivalent.

The theme is one in which personality is seen as not tied to gender. Nor, evidently, is film quality tied to genre, since Almodóvar is evoking trashy Hollywood film but adding a high-art gloss. As Amy Taubin has written in Art Forum, Skin "effortlessly synthesizes the mad-scientist horror flick; a contemporary resetting of a nineteenth-century grand opera narrative (motored by the desire for revenge and filled with dark family secrets); and the most perverse strain of the Hollywood 'Woman's Picture,' where the heroines are wrongly imprisoned in insane asylums or hospitals and treated as sadistically as lab rats."

The director may see himself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein himself, and also as a Pygmalion: he has played Henry Higgins to stars like Banderas and Penélope Cruz. His "victims" in this film are Vicente (Jan Cornet), the rapest, and Vera (Elena Anaya). The evil doctor is Robert Ledgard (Banderas), whose ambiguity is perfect: he never seems anything but bland and impeccable. And his victims embrace him, and their new identity. Essential to Robert's elaborate house/clinic fortress is his housekeeper, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), who also seems to be everybody's mother. The prisoner is Vera, forced to wear a skin-colored body suit, sometimes masked, often operated upon, alternately trying to escape, commit suicide, kill Robert, or seduce him and make him her life partner. After an outsider's intrusion, a series of flashbacks describe Robert's daughter (Blanca Suarez) and Vicente (Jan Cornet), and tell us how they met and Vera came to be under Robert's care/control.

I find this film much more fascinating than Almodóvar's last two films, Volver and Broken Embraces, and his most haunting since Talk to Her. However I agree with the opinion Justin Chang expresses in his Variety review , that the director held back from fully embracing the darkness and perversity of his subject and, caught up in making something enchantingly beautiful, fails to get under our skin where we live as much as he should. The images shot by José Luis Alcaine are gorgeous. The interiors designed by Antxon Gomez are so original and handsome I wished I could linger over them longer. Alberto Iglesias' sweeping, pumped-up score is almost overwhelming, intoxicating. There are overt homages to Louise Bourgeois's sexually taunting sculptures, which are related somehow to the handicraft of Vicente: despite his relative "austerity" this time, as usual, Almodóvar provides more material than we can easily absorb. And on the other hand, according to Chang, he has elided some of the novel's "most emotionally rich passages." So once again it seems despite ample evidence of intelligence and rich cinematic talent and more power than other recent efforts, Almodóvar has allowed style to overwhelm substance. The fascinating gender (and genre) themes would haunt us more if there were more feeling.

La piel que habito debuted at Cannes in May 2011, followed by international film festivals and theatrical releases since the spring in various countries. Sony Pictures begins limited US release October 14, 2011. French and UK releases were August 17 and 26, respectively. Shown as one of the gala events of the main slate of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review.

[Chris Knipp]

JOSEPH CEDAR: FOOTNOTE (2011)


LIOR ASHKENAZI AND SHOLOMO BAR-ABA IN FOOTNOTE

Bitterness and comedy in academe

The US-born Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar's last effort, which won the Silver Bear at Berlin, was Beatufort, a tense, excellent war film about a few members of the Israeli army making a dangerous last stand in south Lebanon in 2000. Footnote deals with a rather different topic -- textual analysis of the Hebrew Talmud. Now there's a change of pace, you will say. But not so much as might seem, because there is excitement here. Footnote is not an action movie but a tragicomedy -- about scholarly integrity; or is it futility? -- with enormous conflict, both repressed and open. It too, like Beaufort, centers compellingly on figures who wander a kind of half-abandoned but still dangerous battleground. It's also a deeply fascinating character study, and would warrant unhesitating recommendation were it not for a weak ending.

Footnote is full of the ironies that arise out of family and occupational rivalry. There is rich intentional ambivalence about the ways in which the film views each of its two main characters, father and son, both, -- this itself ironic -- Talmudic scholars. First is the father, Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba), who has waited vainly for twenty years to receive the Israel Prize in his field. Cedar's own father, by the way, a biochemist, has received the Israel Prize in biology; he himself has studied the Talmud, so he knows whereof he speaks in more ways than one. Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi), Eliezer's son, is more popular among students and his peers, and receives an award as the film begins. At the awards ceremony he gives an ambiguous speech, mostly about his father, who sits stony-faced in the front row listening, not, it would seem, with any approval. The speech is entertaining, light, modest, a tribute to the father. But it also seems to mock him a little. Elieser already emerges from the speech and the way he listens to it as stubborn, dogmatic, and difficult. And if he is admirable, he is equally off-putting.

Elieser is a pure philologist, who approaches the text as a text. His son's work, which speaks more of manners and customs at the time of the texts, he disdainfully refers to as "folkloric." The father turns out to have examined one version of the linguistically problematic Talmud for decades, seeking to suss out inconsistencies. And then another scholar found the other text that caused them, and published his finding before Elieser could, rendering Elieser's decades of work irrelevant. Elieser is a monumentally dedicated scholar. But what has he accomplished? It seems his highest honor is being mentioned as a footnote in the work of another distinguished Talmudic scholar.

The whole film uses a sliding-back-and-forth visual format (with appropriate accompanying sound effect) in presenting its sections and images, to suggest what it's like to examine a manuscript on microfilm in a library. At first Footnote seems to be examining the career of Elieser Shkulnik as if it were itself a footnote or a small detail in a manuscript. But then come the bombshells. First, Elieser is walking, as he does every day, to the national library, to pursue his research, when his cellphone rings and he gets a call telling him he has won the Israel Prize. Then, a little later, Uriel is summoned to an urgent, secret meeting of the Israel Prize committee in a tiny cramped room, to be told that this has been a terrible mistake: he, Uriel, won the prize, not his father. (This is clearly the best scene, tense and confined like much of Beaufort. Some brief sequences showing Uriel to be a cutthroat squash player help to expand our sense of the undercurrent of violence in the events.)

We cannot reveal what happens after that, but it's suspenseful and thought-provoking, and leaves us perhaps forever in doubt as to who is the better man. Is one indeed less fatuous than the other? There probably hasn't been a much better or deeper or more telling on screen look at the jealousies and passions that surround certain kinds of academic work and the ways certain scholars (or brilliant, egocentric men) construct a fortress (a key word in the film) around themselves, the ivory tower protection from the real world. And the immense uncertainty of achievement in narrow fields that few understand or really know about. And then of course there is the question, held suspensefully in the balance almost to the very end: which will win out, professional ambition or family loyalty?

Cedar turns the finale into a meaningless extravaganza in which both the bitter and the comic sides of the story fade into mere spectacle. The film winds up feeling like a memorable little short story that, unfortunately, its author didn't know how to end. But even without an ending this is a strong and original film.

Other characters are also important, such as the chief back-stabber, Yehuda Grossman (Micah Lewesohn, whose brow looks like an exposed brain). Alma Zak and Alisa Rosen are good too as the wives of Urial and Elieser, respectively. And then there is also Uriel's young son (whose name I can't find), a beautiful young man, who is also ambiguous. Is he a useless time-waster, as Uriel suspects, or a free spirit about to choose a different, perhaps more interesting, path?

Footnote was in Competition in May 2011 at Cannes, where it was nominated for the Palme d'Or and won the Best Screenplay award, and also shown at Toronto and New York; at the latter it was screened for this review. Sony Classics has bought the film for US distribution. French release is slated for November 30, 2011.

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[Chris Knipp]

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE (2011)


SEBASTIAN URZENDOWSKY AND LOLA CRÉTON IN GOODBYE, FIRST LOVE

Honest look at early passion

Hansen-Løve's first two films tackled subjects like family dissolution, addiction, and suicide. Her delicate, intelligent, naturally cinematic treatment of such challenging material has established her, at 30, as one of today's best young French filmmakers. That recognition evidently has given her the courage to go back to something simpler and more directly autobiographical, Un amour de jeunesse (the French title) -- a young woman's first passionate love. Nothing quite so harsh here as before in the world beyond the sensitive protagonist: some parents separate, perhaps, but happily, it seems; and nobody crashes. There is just the big task of mastering young emotion. The director's wonderful previous film, The Father of My Children, was more complex, but this one dares to be simple, and to go over material that may seem over-ridden with associations that risk cliché. Its bitter-sweet honesty in examining the traces left on a life by a first love seems essentially French. There is no cliché here. Again the young director approaches big events with bold honesty.

When the film begins the sweet and pretty Camille (Lola Créton) is only 15 and madly in love with a tousle-haired, adorable 19-year-old boy, Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky). They constantly repeat their declarations of love, and make love, seeming to flow in and out of each other. But though sure of what he wants, Sullivan is uncomfortable in Paris and at the university and has already dropped out and decided to go to South America. After selling a valuable little painting to raise money for the trip he is off, leaving Camille behind. It is supposed to be for ten months.

Sullivan sends eloquent letters, but he can't bear to call and hear Camille's voice without being able to touch her. He writes a lot of letters, but then he stops. The film never quite resolves the issue of this departure and separation but there are hints that Sullivan has found Camille too clingy. She is sad, he is happy. Their idyllic trip to the Ardèche together that sun-kissed summer was spoiled because she was so troubled by his travel plan. Her melancholy at the prospect of his departure only hastened it. When he stops writing, she attempts suicide. It's a moment passed over quickly, however. Sullivan does not come back as promised. Eight years pass. Camille studies architecture. She finds a vocation, and an older lover, her Danish professor, a successful architect, Lorenz (Magne-Håvard Brekke), and she goes to work and moves in with him. The surprise is what happens when Sullivan reappears. As it turns out, it isn't over quite yet for either of them.

Uurzendowsky and Créton are excellent, attractive, natural, and spontaneous together, and Camille's experience of architecture is convincingly handled, as are the different personalities of the two men. What's obviously unrealistic to an almost Brechtian degree is that Camille and Sullivan don't age in eight years, and some see this as a flaw. Consider, as justification, that the 15-year-old and 23-year-old Camilles wouldn't look at all different from the viewpoint of a still later Camille. What makes Un amour de jeunesse work, even sing, is the naturalness and confidence and simplicity of Hansen-Love as a filmmaker. The technique is so seamless one wants already to watch the film again, because the nuances (particularly in the acting of the shy but volatile Créton) are complex enough to require multiple viewings.

As in the director's impressive two first features, the first of them made when she was only 23, there is a significant break in the middle, with the present understood later in terms of the past and the audience's established awareness of it. Hansen-Løve has done it again, more delicately than ever, making a film that's both rational and emotional, in the French (and partly New Wave) manner, stating complicated things in a superficially simple way and structuring her tale in a style that emerges as more and more distinctive, but in a native cultural tradition. If Goodbye, First Love isn't as rich a film as The Father of My Children, it is still a subtle accomplishment, remarkable for its way of working out a past longing in the present.

Goodbye, First Love opened in Paris July 6, 2011, to very good reviews. It also was shown at Locarno (jury special mention), Telluride, Toronto, Chicago, and at the New York Film Festival, screened at the latter for this review. Its US distributor is Sundance Selects, and it will open theatrically in New York on Friday, April 20 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and IFC Center.

[Chris Knipp]

RUBEN ÖSTLUND: PLAY (2011)



Realistic pseudo-documentary about teen robbers

Play is a realistic recreation of actual events using non-actors. The filmmaker read a news story about how in his native Swedish city of Göteborg (Gothenberg) a group of young black boys were convicted of carrying out over forty robberies of cell phones and other objects from white boys over a period of several years. They used ingenious methods they'd obviously worked out over repeated performances of their scam. The took advantage of the stereotype of black males as macho and menacing (and the non-black shame at revealing this fear) to seem to threaten their victims without actually using physical force. They also used what they loosely called a "bad cop - good cop" technique. One or more boys behaved in a threatening manner while another, the "good cop," would say something like, "He's angry and unpredictable. I'm not like that. I know you are probably right. But let's just go along with him, and check out the situation, and then there will be no trouble." The scam was for one of the robbers to ask one of the victims to show him his cell phone. Then he would say his brother had been robbed and this looked exactly like his phone that was taken away from him, had the same scratches. Then he would ask the victims to accompany him to go to see his brother. And during the long ordeal for the three trapped boys that follows, the five black boys obviously take great pleasure also in the sheer "Play" of making their victims squirmy and fearful.

This is about the pattern that is followed in the film with five black boys (Anas Abdirahman, Yannick Diakite, Abdiaziz Hilowle, Nana Manu and Kevin Vaz), who are African but speak Swedish, and three obviously better-off locals (Sebastian Blyckert and Sebastian Hegmar, who are white, and John Ortiz, who looks Asian). The robbers appear in a mall and later turn up causing a disturbance in an athletic shoe store. They begin following the white boys on a bus. The white boys go to a fast food restaurant and ask the women there to call the police. But they say they can't do that. Adults seem equally intimidated by the black boys, or afraid of seeming racist, and look the other way despite the black boys' provocative and annoying behavior.

Later the white boys, now under the robbers' control, are on another bus where the robbers cause a big disturbance, menacing and mocking other riders. Some adults, members of a gang, get on and attack the black boys, who get off with their victims, minus one, who stays on to escape. But one of the smaller black boys stays on the bus. When one robber boy tries to go home, the others beat up on him for doing that. Eventually the black boys take the white ones to somewhere out by a lake. This only ends when the black boys make the white boys put all their valuables, MP3 players, cells, etc, out on a nice jacket and stage a "contest" between one of them and one of the white boys, a race at which the black boy cheats and therefore "wins." Then the black boys go off with all the goodies, including a clarinet belonging to one of the victims, the Asian-looking John, and worth 5,000 kroner (about $750). John also loses his nice jacket and a pair of Diesel jeans.

The white victims run away and must take a tram or train home. They are without money and, one more of many ironies, instead of reporting they've been robbed, meekly say nothing, and instead of receiving assistance are fined (or their parents will be) for riding without tickets.

Meanwhile there is another lesser tale threaded through the film of a child's crib on a train. It belongs to an African family. At the end, two Swedish men attack two children from the African family and take away the cell phone of one of them, accusing him of being a robber. The boy screams and protests, believably, that he is honest and his large family has barely enough to eat, but when he is attacked he also, unlike the white boys earlier, strikes back hard, though he's too small to keep his cell phone from being stolen by the adult white vigilantes. Two Swedish women come and protest this illegal and unprovoked assault, but to no avail. Obviously this incident serves to balance out the implication, provocative to some audiences, that the only villains are blacks.

All this is shot in an "observational" vérité style with a middle-distance, largely immobile camera. The improvisation is quite successful, and the film succeeds in making the viewer very uncomfortable. Thanks in part to the "passive" camera and in part to the realism of the recreation it's hard not to identify with the victims and to be disturbed by the complex reactions about racial stereotypes that the action awakens. While we identify with the victims, at the same time ironically the victims tend somewhat, in the way of boys, who want to fit in to any group they're thrown in with, or in a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, to at times identify with and seek to please their black victimizers. Who, by the way, are not old, perhaps in the 11-15 range.

The action can be described as bullying, but it begins as a con game and ends as a kind of hostage situation. The victimized boys become prisoners in a prison without walls that consists of wherever the black boys take them.

This is said to be a follow-up to Östlund's 2008 film Involuntary, and in the past he has made documentaries. This is certainly anything but entertaining, but it's effective and thought-provoking, arguably more so than Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which it might otherwise be compared to. This is more realistic. But I would have to agree with Leslie Felperin in Variety when he describes this film as "formally interesting but far too long." In fact we get the point in ten minutes. Is it necessary for us to be tortured too in order to understand the nonviolent psychological torture the three middle-class white Swedish boys undergo? Felperin is right also in suggesting that this could be a "core text for civics classes." It makes points about stereotyping and racism that might be useful in a condensed form. It is also, perhaps, good for those members of festival audiences who enjoy suffering for a slow, torturous two hours and call films that bring about that effect works of art. Nonetheless this is a valid inclusion in a festival. That's the only logical place for it in this long form. Felperin suggests cutting half an hour. I'd suggest an hour.

Play, not to be confused with Alicia Scherson's poetic Chilean love story (SFIFF 2006) , has been included in festivals in Cannes, Munich, Helsinki, Vancouver, Toronto, and New York; it was screened in New York for this review. One theatrical release is pending, November 11, 2011 in Sweden.

[Chris Knipp]

MICHEL HAZANAVICIUS; THE ARTIST (2011)


JEAN DUJARDIN AND BÉRÉNICE BEJO IN A POSTER FOR THE ARTIST

Silent story

The Artist is another tour de force from Michel Hazanavicius, the French director known for the virtuoso tongue-in-cheek nostalgia of his James Bond-like OSS 117 spoofs based on a novel series and starring the droll and accomplished Jean Dujardin. This time Dujardin stars again, but in a black and white, "silent" film (it has a rich musical sound track, and some moments of talking and sound) that's more nostalgic and touching than satirical, and is set not in the Sixties but the Twenties and Thirties. Dujardin won the Best Actor award at Cannes this year for his appealing mime performance. It's quite a rich performance. After all, doesn't a lot of acting depend on facial and body gesture, independent of dialogue? While Hazanavicius isn't appealing to a niche audience with this wordless film like, say, Guy Madden in his, but to everybody, it remains to be seen how widely the American public will embrace such an odd movie. Nonetheless Dujardin is terrific, and so is his costar, Bérénice Bejo, playing a young talkie star who rescues the fading silent star George Valentin (Dujardin), who gave her her first start.

The Artist's director and its two main stars are French (though, for the record, Bejo was born in Argentina), but the film concerns Hollywood and was made there. The film begins with the lavish 1927 premiere of a swashbuckling silent film starring George Valentin, shown (to a glittering crowd in evening clothes) with full orchestra performing -- the scene was shot at the Orpheum Theater in Hollywood. Everything about the setting is glamorous. Vaentin is a preening mustachioed Douglas Fairbanks type who likes to include his little trick-performing dog Uggie in his films.

Both films-within-the-film and The Artist itself successfully evoke, if not every aspect of the look, at least the emotional feel of silents, and they are interrupted with explanatory titles in the traditional fashion. Valentin steals all the attention when he takes a bow after the Orpheum screening, and then outside for the crowd and the photographers he flirts with a pretty young woman (Peppy, played by Bejo). They exchange a playful kiss and a shot of it lands on the front page. The Kinograph Studios boss Al Zimmer (John Goodman) is annoyed that this gossip story trumps news of the movie. Peppy goes to the studio, trading on this sudden notoriety, and immediately lands a small role in Valentin's new picture -- though their relationship remains flirtatious and nothing more.

It's 1927, and silent films are about to be rendered obsolete by talkies. Peppy becomes one of the new stars of the sound era; the film chronicles her lively rise to fame and fortune. Valentin can't adapt, and his fortunes go quickly downhill. He even fires Clifton (James Cromwell), his chauffeur and faithful man Friday. In a typically simple silent-film twist, Clifton goes to work as Peppy's chauffeur. Valentin's hitherto faithful wife (Penelope Ann Miller) leaves him. After failing in the attempt to produce, direct, and star in a new silent film, he loses everything in the Wall Street Crash, turns to drink, sells all his possessions at auction, and in despair sets fire to a pile of his films in his living room, which almost kills him. Uggie saves his life. And Peppy steps in to nurse him back to health. In the final sequence, she saves him from suicide, and has the inspiration of making Valentin a star again as her dancing partner in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers style. Their scene rehearsing a dance sequence restores the good mood the film had at its outset and links the fortunes of the two stars, old and new.

The full orchestra that accompanied the Orpheum premiere (led by OSS collaborator Ludovic Bource) plays continuously and lushly throughout the film, providing crucial support to compensate for the lack of dialogue (other than the periodic English intertitles, which are used with restraint). Uggie deserves an award too and provides his own way of spelling things out without spoken words.

Valentin has an interesting nightmare. He is in his dressing room and suddenly for the first time objects tapped on the table make a sound. Everything makes sounds now. But Valentin tries to shout and nothing comes out. How surreal silent films were, we realize!

Among other things, The Artist shows how an experienced European director with panache can produce a rich and complex film on a lesser budget. However it may be met with indifference by mainstream US audiences indifferent to film history, this is a terrifically original and entertaining film. Jean Dujardin deserved his Cannes award: he puts on a grand show, evoking Frederic March and John Gilbert as well as Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, dancing up a storm at the end in a turn with his costar worthy of Astaire and Rogers. Bejo makes a fresh and charming ingenue-star. Film buffs will enjoy catching references to Hitchcock, Welles' Citizen Kane, and many more inspirations. At the end though, this remains a narrow conceit that touches but doesn't deeply move.

The Cannes, Moscow, Montreal, Toronto, Athens, Zurich festivals have shown The Artist, as has the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. It has releases in a number of countries. Harvey Weinstein has bought the US rights and will release it in the US November 23, 2011; UK release is December 30. It opened in Paris October 12, 2011 to virtually universal acclaim from local critics.

[Chris Knipp]

ALEXANDER PAYNE: THE DESCENDANTS (2011)


GEORGE CLOONEY AND SHAILENE WOODLEY IN THE DESCENDANTS

Old money Hawaiian dad becomes mensch

Alexander Payne, returning to the big screen for the first time since Sideways seven years ago, has made a film even more intensely rooted in place than anything he's done before. And it's a film full of geniality and wisdom; funny, unpredictable, and sui generis -- while seeming on the surface remarkably like mainstream entertainment. The source is a novel by a young Hawaiian-born women, Kaui Hart Hemmings, who narrates from the point of view of a middle-aged man, Matt King (George Clooney), who comes from Hawaiian royalty, literally, but is hapa haole -- his family is a mixture of white (haole) and native Hawaiian. On the Hawaiian side, they are directly descended from King Kamehameha. And with that comes land and wealth. Matt is principal trustee of a particularly important property, 25,000 acres of unspoiled land on Kauai that the family is planning to sell.

But there are other threads in the story; Matt has a lot on his plate. Before even the titles comes a shot of his wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) on a speedboat. She is in an accident in that boat and hits her head. She is lying in a hospital in a coma. Suddenly Matt, a lawyer in an office all the time managing property, escaping from everyday responsibility, must take charge of two unruly daughters, ten and 17. And shortly he must make the hardest decision of all, to follow his wife's wishes when it turns out she won't emerge from the coma. The property sale decision is looming. And then, a secret comes out about his wife that preoccupies all three of them.

The Descendants shows a new side to George Clooney, the arch charmer and megastar, a softer, more rumpled side, as his Matt approaches being a parent with his teenage daughter Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), who's had a drinking problem and been shifted from one posh school to another. After he picks her up they're joined by her friend and support, young Sid (Nick Krause), an outspoken stoner type who seems like a dope but is smart, and is the vice president of the chess club of the Punahou School. Sid exemplifies the complexity of the film's main characters. He is far more than he first appears. At home the young daughter Scottie (Amara Miller), has started to act out and to use foul language she's picked up from Alex.

Matt seems helpless at this point, not so much overwhelmed by decisions as the victim of decisions made for him. His wife's living will requires him to pull the plug on her once the doctors determine that after three weeks she has no potential life signs. Matt is the trustee with the crucial vote on the property sale, but a family majority has already voted to sell. It's not that Matt is particularly cowardly or weak, simply that his wife, a party girl who bucked him every step of the way, was also always the live wire, the provocative, energetic, take-charge one, not him. But the journey of the film leads Matt, with a little help from friends and family, to take charge, and in incredibly specific ways.

Also incredibly specific at all times, but subtly so, is the film's milieu, Hawaii, with its traditions, its almost oppressive beauty, its strong family structure and sense of identity and lineage, and the mockery of its facade of perfection when it's got the same damned problems the rest of the world has. It's an ironic place to be for Matt with all that's going on. "Paradise can go fuck itself" he says, in an early voiceover. There is nothing touristic or pretty-pretty about Payne's Hawaii. And as the sense of place is sophisticated and informed, so the contemporary social observation as revealed in the dialogue is exceptionally keen: you could call that the sense of time. Also part of the sense of place is the array of family members, notably Matt's surly father-in-law (Robert Forster), who socks Sid for laughing at his senile wife; and the jovial long-haired cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges), who reveals astonishing information at a bar.

The voyage (as in Sideways and About Schmidt there is one, or are several) is toward unearthing information, and then deciding what to do about it, and toward mensch status for Matt. Characters turn out to be more than they seem. Alex emerges as sharp and savvy. The dumbo Sid turns out to be someone Matt is not stupid to ask serious advice from.

The Descendants is deceptive. One can't do justice to it in a short review -- besides which it contains plot elements that can't be spoken of to readers who may not yet have seen the film. It seems genial and mainstream, but it works on multiple levels. It appears jokey and entertaining, but it deals with some of the toughest of life's issues. It might seem an unnecessary choice for the selective main slate of the New York Film Festival, except that it turns out to be one of the best American films of the year, and the first for some time from a director whose two previous works were main slate items too.

The Descendants debuted at Teluride, then Toronto, then the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, where it was screened for this review. It will be released by Fox Searchlight Pictures in the US November 18, 2011; the UK release date is January 27, 2012.