Her smiling face fills the screen. The warm waters of the Pacific splash past her joy filled eyes while the tropical breeze blows through her hair.

As I received the opening images of The Descendants, I leaned over, looked at Kate and spoke a truth we both already knew: “She’s a goner.”

Alexander Payne opens his film by briefly letting us taste something [life with Elizabeth King], only so that he can take it away. He starts us somewhere, so he can take us somewhere else and show us that we never actually were in the place we thought we were when we started.

A story that includes royal bloodlines, inherited real estate and the debate of a family about what to do with it all makes The Descendants sound like the twin of PBS’s celebrated Downton Abby. If so, they are fraternal, but most definitely not identical, twins. Their core is the same; their presentation of that core is worlds apart.

The film follows Mike King [George Clooney] as he attempts to navigate his wife’s coma [which is the final result of the opening scene’s boat ride], his two adolescent daughters adolescent-ness, and his large extended family.

Nothing in this film seems like it couldn’t be a part of your life. Payne is able to take Hawaiian locations and make them feel like your hometown instead of a picture in a timeshare brochure. Where some filmmakers choose to only shoot during “magic hour” so that the light is dreamlike, Payne focuses on the rest of the day and night of life when the light shines equally on the good and bad: Life in matte finish. This is really the heart of the film—a life presented for us to see that hasn’t been airbrushed or Photoshopped. We’re invited to see how the broken pieces of each character have a genesis—how we are all descendants of our past experiences. Even Sid, the boy friend of Mike’s rebellious daughter Alexandra, who could have been minimized in this film to simple comedic relief [and he is hilarious], has a story that matters to the film, and probably matters to you. It all just works in this movie because it all works on you.

Clooney gives Bill Murray a run for his money when it comes to acting with just his eyes. Much of the film has the camera tight on Clooney’s face. And while that may seem like a way to play up the handsome George in yet another leading role, it’s not.  Here Clooney simply plays a guy trying to figure out life as it bounces over the unpredictable waves.

Was he driving safely? Was he taking caution along the way? Was he considering the others in the boat as he moved along?

Probably not.

But as we watch Mike King awaken from his emotional coma just as his wife forever fades into her physical one, we witness what it looks like to live life again and start fresh. The Descendants invites us all to consider the comas we’re living in. It urges us to wake up and consider how we’ve been driving our boats. It attempts to help us open our eyes. It does this by sitting, calmly, next to our beds, slowly rubbing our hands and saying our names.

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Eric Kuiper is the Young Adult/Community Life Coordinator at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. If you enjoy this article, you might also want to check out his other writings on his own blog, Burning PineCones, and on Project rednoW.