Clooney

George Clooney is superb in his film "The Descendants". But he's always pretty good. He usually plays the part of an upper middle-class guy whose life seems satisfactory yet there's something going on in his head that makes him doubt it. He can do comedy but of a sort that is sophisticated; a bit like Cary Grant - though he's not as funny as Grant at his looniest. David Thomson compares him to the early William Holding but I can't see that: he's gentler than Holding; Holding could play dirty, a cynic whereas Clooney can only play clean, open-minded, charming. He tends to play men with a problem to cope with in their lives; not a physical problem like a mountain to climb but a moral one. He's on the left in real life but not so much a socialist, I think, as a liberal; he cares about how people are governed, how they are treated by big organisations, how they are manipulated. This feeling of good will he takes on in the characters he plays so that when they are themselves a trifle ruthless as in "Up In The Air" he gradually becomes conscious of this and, while he doesn't do anything drastic to change things, he does feel deeply about it so that you think "yes, he might try to change things for the better".
His character in "The Descendants" has many traits: he doesn't know how to handle his teenage children because he has never learned to - his wife has managed that; he can't face up his wife's infidelity but he struggles to find some aspect of it he can cling to - he doesn't seek revenge on his wife's lover but, rather, wants to make the man go to the hospital where she lies in a deep and deadly coma, something he feels he owes her.
The film is enjoyable on many levels but not least for the performances it produces. Not just Clooney, though he is in every scene and dominates most without being dominant, but his two daughters and other members of his large family, mostly cousins, are played to perfection. And there is a young man in it who, whenever he's on the screen, induces chuckles - he is simply a lug with a coarse sense of humour and a tactlessness that makes Groucho Marx appear saintly.
There's a scene between the lad and Clooney that is simply superb. Clooney cannot stand the boy but, one night when he can't sleep, he accidentally wakes the lad and they chat, and gradually you see that the boy is actually a human being and that Clooney begins to like him. It's a masterclass in acting from both but the boy's job is easy while Clooney uses all his technique and charm to show the gradual change in his character. It's beautiful to behold.