From director Alexander Payne, THE DESCENDANTS (2011) features a central performance from AFI Life Achievement Award honoree George Clooney – and was honored with a 2011 AFI AWARD, recognizing it as one of the year’s most outstanding achievements in the art of the moving image. According to the official AFI AWARDS rationale, “THE DESCENDANTS paints a richly convincing family portrait at once painfully funny and profoundly poignant. Alexander Payne’s strikingly original film balances the intimacy of family tragedy with the expansive politics of dynastic inheritance in the year’s most human comedy. With the weight of paradise on his shoulders, George Clooney delivers an eccentrically elegant turn as the reluctant patriarch who must come to terms with how to let go and when to hold on.”
Visit the AFI Catalog to learn more about THE DESCENDANTS.