The Descendants (2011)Movies

I went into “The Artist” mainly because I wanted to stake out a seat for the followup picture, Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants,” but I got the comparative importance of these two pictures exactly wrong. “The Descendants,” which stars George Clooney as a dad of two teen daughters and heir to a $500 million piece of property, is intelligent, sober, well-crafted and has a heart. It’s also endless, dull, repetitive and a colossal downer. Clooney spends the entire movie waiting for his wife to die and meanwhile he finds out she’s been cheating on him. Yet it’s impossible to feel too sorry for a guy who looks like Clooney and stands to win a fortune. A schmo like Philip Seymour Hoffman should have been the star, but then no one would...