SPOILER ALERT (It's way at the bottom and MARKED). Clooney is stiff as a plank in this overlong, unsatisfactory drama. The first hint you get is the opening with heavy-handed narration. Narration is always a bad sign. The movie simply PLODS onward from that inauspicious beginning. While the movie does avoid the soap-opera aspects of the story, it betrays its only interesting character. Here's the SPOILER: I'm talking about Syd, the glib, prize-jackass boyfriend of the unstable/semi-druggie older daughter. The dope who thinks granny's Alzheimer's is funny. Everybody grows up a little in this story (except, I guess, the younger daughter, who's a cipher--just there for others to worry about) but the one who grows up most and most unexpectedly is Syd. So much so that in fact, in a late scene at the hospital, where Clooney is being unfairly jumped on, Syd is the FIRST to stand up for him. This character development creeps up on you because a) it's subtle and b) there ain't much else, but it's the stand-out of the film. Apart from that, the script MAKES him important: there's a protracted if unbelievable scene in which Clooney has a late-night 'what would you do in my shoes?' heart-to-heart talk with him alone. Yet after all that the script just dumps him. Not even dumps him--that would require some action of some sort. He's just completely omitted from the climactic scenes, as if he never existed. And so this is an utterly unmemorable movie. Six months from now even its fans will struggle to remember it.
Review of The Descendants
