Alexander Payne may only have a few features to his name, but he has already presented a fairly consistent pattern in terms of his chosen focus. Election, About Schmidt, Sideways, they’ve all showcased rather unpleasant people unwilling to grow up, regardless of their station in life. This preoccupation with the arrested development in the older gent, the mature man displaying decidedly immature behaviour, has served Payne well in the past. He’s directed five actors into Oscar nominations and earned himself six nominations in for Script, Director and Film, one of which he won. For his latest, it seems he’s had a slight change in his pattern.

After his wife suffers a severe head injury in a boating accident and winds up in a coma, a wealthy Hawaiian land baron becomes the sole parent to his two daughters. Whilst overseeing a massive land deal, which has implications for his whole family and the state of Hawaii, he tries to reconnect with his children… but then learns that his wife was having an affair before her accident and wants to confront the other man.

As I said, Payne’s prior fixation has always been with grown men doing bad things when they should really know better. Look at Matthew Broderick’s adulterous schoolteacher in Election, holding a certain grudge against a student that reminds him of the kind of girl he used to hate when he was young (“God, she’s so annoying and so smart and so obnoxious and so pretty and so young… bitch!”), and taking petty vengeance on her by trying to sabotage her student president campaign. Or look at Jack Nicholson’s Warren Schmidt in About Schmidt, a quietly unassuming retiree and recent widower whose outwardly docile demeanour belies the impotent rage, dark thoughts and family problems only the really repressed can store up for so long. Or the double-whammy of Sideways’ grumpy failed novelist, thief and borderline alcoholic Miles and womanising egotistical douche Jack, played by Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church respectively. Each of them, for all intents and purposes, have no real reason to act the way they do other than that’s just how they’ve always been. They should have grown out of their ways years ago, but they haven’t and now they’re middle-aged (or older) and circling the drain of perpetual mid-life crisis.

What marks The Descendants apart from Payne’s previous work is that, in his main character, Matt King, he has someone who isn’t the immature, middle-aged screw-up we would have come to expect from this director. King is far from perfect (absentee husband and parent), but he displays a greater poise and sense of dignity… and this is now where the conflict lies. When Matt is forced to fully engage in his family life, it all lands at once. Dying wife, messed-up kids, a father-in-law that doesn’t much care for him. Then there’s the business deal that could make him and his many cousins a vast fortune each, though he alone must make the decision. Just to add one last thing, it turns out that his wife was having an affair.

This is the point that the regular Payne protagonist would come off the rails, give in to his vindictive side and go on a rampage, although in this case it would be perfectly understandable, even justified. However, this is the major difference. Although he absolutely entertains notions of going after The Other Guy, aided enthusiastically by his eldest daughter, he genuinely does his best to rein it in, for the sake of his children and his own stability. The land deal with his cousins, which weighs heavily over the citizens of Hawaii, becomes the metaphor for his own familial struggle, where his stressed self acts as the single linchpin that can bind or obliterate everything he holds dear. Unlike the Miles and Jacks of the world, Matt understands the implications of what he does beyond himself. How his family will suffer, how his business will suffer, how his homeland will suffer. Just because it's broken, doesn't mean you keep breaking it.

And Clooney does superb as King. Probably the most emotionally vulnerable he’s ever been onscreen, you see in his face the conflict to keep himself in check or shirk the vast weight of his responsibility and go quick some guy in the face. There’s much talk of this being Clooney’s finest hour, much accentuated by the recent Oscar nod. Whilst I don’t personally think it is (I go with Michael Clayton for that), it really is a great performance and certainly one of his best. Everyone he shares the screen with is on good form too (like Shailene Woodley and Robert Forster), but this is all Clooney’s show.

There will be some level of disappointment from some, it has to be said. Some will find it rather inconsequential or bland, and particularly those used to Payne’s more biting concerns will perhaps be a little underwhelmed by the much nicer run of things in The Descendants. It’s always a bit more fun to watch the immature idiots fall deeper into their own shameful chasms, but this is Payne trying to stop himself from doing that very thing. He’s trying to show someone trying to hold on rather than let go. It probably won’t have the same lasting effect as, say, Election, and I dare say that it’s probably not one many will likely see twice.

Is it a great film? No, it can really sit no higher than quite good (if you want a great film about a man trying to maintain his composure when his life is turning to crap, go with A Serious Man), although it does feature a solid turn from Clooney and marks an interesting turn for Payne. Overall, though, The Descendants is still a decent movie-watching experience.