The Descendants (2011)

George Clooney continues to impress me. He has dodged the 'just another pretty face' moniker and gone for some very gritty roles. In this one he faces multiple personal challenges and comes out looking human. Here's the scenario as it quickly unfolds in the film: Clooney's Matt King is a workaholic casual Honolulu attorney. He doesn't like to brag, but he is descended from royal blood: His great-great-grandmother was a Hawaiian princess who married a haole (white) banker and passed on a beautiful and very large parcel of real estate in Kauia to her heirs. As the man in charge, Matt must decide which of the developers to sell it to (for some reason, keeping it is not an option) to please an army of cousins, led by a weedling Beau Bridges. Matt has more personal issues than just his extended family to worry about--his nuclear family is coming apart at the seams. A boating accident has left his neglected wife, Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie), in a coma and left Matt (who is hard to find as a parent) in charge of their two daughters, neither of whom is doing all that well. They are Scottie (Amara Miller,), who is all of 10 but has quite the mouth on her, and seen-it-all Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), 17, who is reckless with both boys and drugs, which has landed her in boarding school. Just when Matt steps it up as a husband and father, he gets round two of adversity, first when he's informed that Elizabeth will never come out of her coma, and then when Alex tells him that his wife was cheating on him. So what does he do? He decides to go visit the land he has been left in charge of deciding it's fate and to confront the man his wife has been having an affair with. Since his kids know about the affair, he includes them in the trip (we have to cut the man some slack in the judgement department--his wife is dying), and along the way they try to figure out how to live without the wife and mother that they share, and how to move forward as a family. It is a wildly successful contemplation of how to deal with loss in the modern era (taking economics out of the equation). The best movie of 2011 that I have seen.