‘There’s Barb!’ with Clooney in The Descendants

For those wondering about which movie to attend this weekend, may I recommend The Descendants?

The fam and I attended last weekend for several reasons. First of all, George Clooney is one of our favourite actors — it’s pretty hard to go wrong with a George Clooney movie. And, The Descendants is getting rave reviews and has already won several awards, with the Oscars still weeks away.

Besides which, and most of  all, we wanted to see our friend and former Kamloopsian Barbara Lee Southern, who has a part in the movie.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, Barb Duggan, as she was known when she was here, was my manager (and a damn good one, I might add) in my first mayoral campaign and worked as a consultant on some local projects before returning to live in Hawaii.

She began taking acting lessons and started getting small parts in movies set in Hawaii such as Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Then she landed a role in The Descendants with Clooney and a stellar cast.

“There’s Barb!” we whispered when she appeared on screen for her first scene in the part of Alice “Tutu” Thorson, the mother of Clooney’s dying on-screen wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie).

The scene was only a couple of minutes and she had a half dozen lines in her role as the aging mother-in-law suffering from dementia. She’d told me she got to kiss Clooney on the cheek and, sure enough, there it was.

Scene over and we figured that was it, but awhile later she appeared again in a scene at the hospital where Matt King’s (Clooney’s) wife lay in a coma. And, she got to kiss Clooney again.

Much is being written about this possibly being Clooney’s greatest role, and maybe he is. He plays a hard-working lawyer and land developer who has no time to enjoy the good life in Hawaii, nor much time for his wife and two daughters.

Shailene Woodley largely steals the show as the teenaged daughter on the verge of rebellion, and Amara Miller as the younger sister Scottie is cutely precocious.

The story itself is, essentially, family drama, with occasional dark humour to lighten it up. Central to the story are Clooney/King’s discovery that his wife had been having an affair before her boating accident, and an impending land deal that would see 2,500 acres of pristine family land sold for hotels and condos.

The scenes between Clooney and Hastie are the most poignant — at one point he rails at Hastie for “lying there on a ventilator and fucking up my life.”

But, when Woodley, as his eldest daughter, comes in a couple of minutes later and unloads similar bitterness on the unconscious and dying woman, Clooney chastises her, saying “you have no right to talk to her that way.”

It’s worth watching on the big screen. And there’s the bonus of seeing someone you know, and who you used to see around our own city, in a potential Academy Award winner.