Ecology and *The Descendants*

Payne’s The Descendants (2011) has received almost universal critical acclaim as a family melodrama with comic elements and adaptation of the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings. George Clooney stars as Matt King, a middle-age Hawaiian lawyer who also runs a trust responsible for millions of dollars worth of untouched real estate that has been passed down to him and various cousins from his royal Hawaiian ancestors.

The film seems to center on his and his family’s responses to King’s wife’s (Patricia Hasty) severe head trauma during a boat race. Matt’s two daughters, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and Scottie (Amara Miller) confront their mother’s impending death with various outbursts, but as Matt attempts to get the family’s affairs in order, Alexandra reveals that his wife (her mother) had been having an affair. With his two daughters in tow, Matt sets off to confront the man who won his wife’s heart.

This traditional family plot, however, is complicated by the ecological message at the heart of the film. While dealing with his wife’s coma and infidelity, Matt King is also preparing to sell the family acreage and make millions for everyone in the trust, a deal that would turn thousands of pristine land into a tourist resort area complete with hotels and golf courses. As Joe Morenstern of the Wall Street Journal explains, “Descended from Hawaiian royalty on one side and haole missionaries on the other, Matt is a steward of sacred land, and he knows it.

Matt’s own voiceover provides further explanation:

The whole goddamned state is following my decision on who’s going to buy 35,000 acres on Kaua’i my family has owned since the 1860s. My cousins and I meet in six days to approve a buyer. Ever since my father died nine years ago, I’m the sole trustee, the controlling trustee, so I hold all the cards.

Matt’s cousins support his decision to sell the acreage and divide the proceeds, since they have already spent most of their trust money. Matt, on the other hand, has supported his family on his income as a real estate attorney. Now, however, he explains in another voiceover, he may be forced to sell the property or lose it in seven years:

My great-great-grandmother was Princess Margaret Ke’alohilani, one of the last direct descendants of King Kamehameha. She was originally supposed to marry her hanai brother, but she fell in love with her haole banker and estate manager, Edward King, whose parents were missionaries. Between his land deals and her huge inheritance, all of their descendants for generations have watched the past unfurl millions into our laps through leases and sales. Now the Rule Against Perpetuities is forcing us to dissolve the trust, and we’re selling the last parcel of undeveloped land.

This land trust and Matt’s struggle with his wife’s affair become entangled, however, when he discovers that her lover, Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard) is also a major part of the real estate deal he and the majority of his cousins support. Speer also serves as the motivation for Matt’s visit to his family property, providing him and his daughters with what may be a last look at the old Hawaii. Scottie even laments missing out on the camping trips Alexandra had shared with her parents on this pristine property.

For these reasons, Matt chooses the ecologically sound decision and refuses to sell the property, telling his cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges) that he has seven years to figure out a way to outsmart the Rule of Perpetuities. As he explains to Hugh in one of the few dialogue-driven pieces of exposition,

People will be relieved, Hugh, the whole state. I sign that document, it’s over. End of the line. Something that was ours to protect will be gone. Even though we’re haole as shit and go to private schools and clubs and can’t even speak pidgin, let alone Hawaiian, we still carry Hawaiian blood, and we’re still tied to this land. And our children are tied to this land. It’s a miracle that for whatever bullshit reason 150 years ago, we own this much of... paradise, but we do. And for whatever bullshit reason now, I’m the trustee. And I’m not signing. And if you sue me, it’ll only make us closer.

The decision also reconnects him and his family with their native Hawaiian past and with each other, perhaps demonstrating some of the benefits of maintaining our interconnected web with the natural world.