The Descendants (2011)

           After his wife suffered a boating accident in Waikiki, the real estate attorney Matt King (George Clooney) faced the harsh reality that he had been an absentee husband and father who was now left to care for two bratty teenage girls and his wife Elizabeth who was in a coma. To complicate matters, Matt was also the trustee of 25,000 acres of pristine and undeveloped land on Kauai, worth about $500 million; you can bet that everyone had an opinion about whether and to whom to sell this land that had been in the family for generations. Finally, Matt learns that Elizabeth had cheated on him. This film garnered five Academy Award nominations, including best picture, but this multilayered plot didn't work for me. Only the consequences of his wife's affair received any meaningful development, and much of that seemed unreal to me. Nor did the teenage humor work with the otherwise tragic story line, never mind that most of it was scatological and not funny. Finally, a surprise ending about the disposition of the land raised a new issue that was also undeveloped and which had no basis in anything that preceded it. But the film stars George Clooney, so there you go.