The Descendants - No Doubt It's Hard!

(2011) ★★★☆☆

Matt (George Clooney) has been probably too busy for his wife and his two problematic daughters that, like it or not, really steal the show. He’s now dealing with the consequences as his wife’s fallen into a coma after an accident. In ‘The Descendants’, Mr Clooney is after all not so charming as he always appears in other films, which is good for he really shows his potential of being a great actor, especially at the last scene where he says one last goodbye to his wife. ‘Goodbye, my love, my pain…’, that’s the most sentimental moment of all. It reminds me again of the fact that love and hate are basically the same thing.

Is ‘The Descendants’ a serious drama? Not quite. It makes me laugh from time to time due to characters’ ‘unusual’ reactions to what we call serious situations, and humorous dialogues. But just because it makes you laugh doesn’t make it a comedy. If you were Matt himself, I guess you’d get depressed, go mad, break down and cry. You’d be making bad decisions for yourself, for you kids, and for the business you’re running. I kind of look up to Matt despite feeling ambivalent about this film.

Most of us don’t like to talk about death or face up to it. It’s the only thing that we’re sure will happen, but we seldom bring it up till the day it really gets us. And when it does come, we tend to grieve instead of being grateful. Thanks to death, hopefully, we’re able to treasure what we have with our beloved and all the others we know; who we are; and the time when we’re alive, every second of it. I quite appreciate Westerners’ openness to the subject of death, unlike the Chinese apt to think of it as something negative. Death means saying goodbye to this decaying body and starting afresh. It’s not the end of anything. It’s, on the contrary, the beginning of everything!

‘I guess that’s it’, says Matt, before he pours his wife’s ashes into the sea. He seems respectful, thankful and forgiving to what's happened to him. No doubt it’s hard, but that’s the way we should all learn to be. Don’t you think?