The Descendants is a poignant, moving story about difficult decision

Director: Alexander Payne

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Nick Krause, Beau Bridges, Matthew Lillard

Alexander Payne has carved out his niche - telling stories about white, suburban middle-aged men in crisis.

F rom Matthew Broderick in Election to Paul Giamatti in Sideways and Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt , Payne's characters are unfulfilled.

They live on the outskirts of urban America and are forced to make one last attempt to find happiness before death catches up with them and turns them into nameless additions to the infinite wasted-potential roster.

Payne's potentially depressing area of interest is given popular appeal and charm by his wry sense of humour.

This adds a light touch to his material, which makes him more of a cinematic brother to Richard Ford than John Cheever or Raymond Carver - US authors who play in the same angst-ridden arena on the page as Payne does on screen.

His latest film, The Descendants, adapted from a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is set in Hawaii, where we find Matt King (Clooney), scion of a chilled out, once wealthy family descended from island royalty.

He is faced with a number of tough decisions, which have to be dealt with simultaneously.

His wife is in a coma after a water skiing accident, his family want him to make a decision about selling a piece of land for a small fortune that will set them up for life and he has to look after his two wayward daughters.

When he finds out that his wife has had an affair, Matt's cool-headed façade takes a blow and, together with his 10-year-old daughter Scottie (Miller), her headstrong 17-year-old sister Alexandra (Woodley) and her outspoken boyfriend Sid (Krause), he goes on a search for his wife's other man (Lillard).

He is unsure of what he's going to do when he finds the other man, but Alexandra and Sid encourage him to "man up" and do something about the situation.

Written and directed with Payne's signature empathy, humour and feel for performance, The Descendants is entertaining, poignant and moving.

This is thanks in no small part to Clooney's performance, in which he manages to balance his Cary Grant screwball tendencies with quiet humanity.

The result is that King resembles both a typical Payne protagonist and an average guy fighting to put his life back together in a perceived island paradise, which, beyond the brochures, is just as complicated as anywhere else where humans live.

As King remarks in a voiceover - "Paradise? Paradise can go f**k itself" - as enticing a logline as any film could hope for.

'The Descendants' opens at cinemas today