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Nothing gives me more pleasure than to welcome a new film by the gifted writer-director Alexander Payne, especially as The Descendants, his first movie since Sideways eight years ago, is so good, and in so many ways. His early pictures centred on the troubled lives, doubts and self-deceptions of middle-class people in his native Nebraska: the teacher played by Matthew Broderick getting into hot water of his own making inElection; the grumpy retired insurance executive (Jack Nicholson at his most engagingly misanthropic) coming to terms with the death of his wife in About Schmidt.
In Sideways, Payne moved west to California, where two uneasy former college friends (one divorced, one about to marry) embark on a disastrous wine-tasting vacation.
As far as the movies are concerned, Hawaii is a place for grim-faced pioneers such as Charlton Heston and Max von Sydow to found businesses and churches; for career soldiers stationed there to confront the Japanese who stab them in the back at Pearl Harbor; for mindless vacationers like Elvis to put on floral shirts, drape their necks with leis and dance on the beach, or for bronzed surfers in quest of the perfect wave.
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