Brad Pitt, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson at No. 8 (PMc)

Last night the Cinema Society and Men's Health presented Brad Pitt's latest feature (besides those Chanel ads), a dark shoot-em-up called Killing Them Softly. The after party, held at No. 8, was jammed back full of celebs, though Mr. Pitt, Harvey Weinstein, Jack McBrayer, and Amy Adams remained secluded from the whole ordeal by two large security guards who literally linked arms to stop the crush of people from trying to wiggle their way into the VIP area.

Besides being an odd hodge-podge of fame, can we just examine, for a moment, Jack McBrayer's IRL persona, which is not very distinguishable from that of his 30 Rock character, Kenneth Parcell? I.e., when telling the actor how much we liked his animated performance in Wreck-It-Ralph, he replied, "Awww, gosh, thanks!" Which is definitely something we can all imagine Kenneth saying, yes?

Nearby, Chris Noth was giving advice to a young woman with dark hair. "If you aren't doing what you love, I'd just say quit. Is your agent getting you work these days?"

Two feet away, Ray Liotta had stopped to talk to Fisher Stevens. "Fuck that motherfucker," he said, in response to a mutual acquaintance. "Just fuck that guy."

Upstairs, Patrick Wilson conferred with Rose Byrne and a bevy of beautiful models while Boardwalk Empire stars Bobby Carnivale and Billy Magnussen mingled with friends on the stairs.

With bodies crushed at the bar to get to the liquor sponsor of the evening, DeLeón tequila, we kept being nudged in the back by a very tall young man with a newsboy hat and a wispy beard. ("What kind of drinks are they making? What does your tattoo say? Etc.)

Finally we handed Matthew Lillard the drink menu so he could check out for himself, and remarked how much we had loved Scream as a teenager.

"Did you know that it came out on Thanksgiving weekend?" he asked. "It was this brilliant piece of counter-culture programming, ever. That was all Harvey."

And what was Mr. Lillard doing in New York these days?

"Oh, just hanging out with this guy! We're making a movie together," he said, waving down the person on the other side of us.

"Hello, I'm Patrick," said Sir Patrick Stewart. We all ordered some sort of whiskey/bourbon and soda/water combination and raised our glasses.

With all the blood and guts and gore that make for (apparent) box-office gold during the holidays seasons, we asked Mr. Lillard if he had any favorite non-violent Christmas classics.

"Well, there's really only two, and they are cliche," he admitted. "There's the Jimmy Stewart one, and A Christmas Story."

Had he heard about the terrible straight-to-DVD sequel of the A Christmas Story that recently came out?
http://youtu.be/YHJNBZ2rrMM

"Don't tell me that...I wish you hadn't told me that," Mr. Lillard groaned. "In fact, you didn't tell me that. I am glad that I have never been told such a terrible thing."

He told us the next time we were in Ohio, we should go visit the Christmas Story house, which had artifacts from the film. We promised we would. Sir Patrick Stewart was with his partner, Sunny Ozwell.

As we left, we passed the crowd surrounding Mr. Pitt even within the relatively contained VIP section. He had long hair. Angelina Jolie was not with him. Harry Belafonte was, though. We quickly finished up our bourbon and left onto the wintery streets, where paparazzi still mingled, huddled together for warmth and determined to get a picture of Mr. Pitt leaving the Chelsea club before the night was over.

The Descendents.

The Descendants is a soap opera with Hawaiian shirts. It’s worth seeing for the sharp but uneven human observations in the script and direction by Alexander Payne (Sideways), and sometimes it’s fun (but mostly exasperating) watching George Clooney trying to act as he struggles through the role of a man trying to raise two needy daughters while grieving over the loss of his wife in a boating accident. Clichés ensue. Clooney fans may be pleased to see their hero in a sentimental tearjerker, but the fawning and gushing of so many astute critics who have greeted this plodding melodrama with raves on the film-festival circuit mystifies me. The Descendants has moments, and I give it high marks for making literal sense at a time when few movies do, but it isn’t original or revealing enough to merit a running time of just under two hours. To me, it doesn’t come close to this year’s other George Clooney potboiler, The Ides of March.

As Matt King, the descendant of a royal Hawaiian princess (huh?), the star controls a plot of 25,000 acres of priceless virgin territory in Kauai that everyone urges him to sell to greedy developers for more money than Dole has pineapples. It’s a bad time for a work-obsessed entrepreneur under pressure. While he’s playing real estate lawyer and sorting out his differences with relatives (headed by Beau Bridges) to keep the land pristine and save Paradise, he also has to grapple with the decision to pull the plug on his brain-dead wife, Liz, who has been lying in the hospital in a coma for 23 days. Suddenly the backdrop of swaying palms and cobalt skies seems like a cruel irony to this island native who spends all of his time in shorts and banana-leaf T-shirts. “Paradise can go fuck itself,” he says in the opening voiceover. He’s mad with good cause. He’s also terrified of being left alone to raise 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), the cynical daughters he has never taken the time to know. Grief morphs into real rage when Alexandra, home from boarding school with ascerbic put-downs and attitude, drops the bomb that their perfect mom also had a lover on the side Matt didn’t even know about and was planning to divorce him. Matt is understandably confused, and the three women in his life are a mess. Cynical Alexandra is into drugs and older men. Scottie cusses and emails her friends about sex. Liz, he discovers, was a secret party girl into motorcycles, speedboats and heavy drinking. “She doesn’t want us sitting around watching her spoil like milk,” he grumps, but when her condition turns terminal, one contrivance after another piles up like a stack of toothpicks, as Pop and the girls deal with a scrappy grandpa (Robert Forster), a grandmother with Alzheimer’s, the wife’s married lover (Matthew Lillard) and the lover’s own unsuspecting wife (Judy Greer). Along for the ride is Alexandra’s rude, insensitive, politically clueless, surf-dude boyfriend, Sid (Nick Krause). The movie is about the ways a reluctant schlump with no parenting skills and a pathetic view of the human race is forced to re-evaluate his mistakes, count his losses and wake up before it’s too late to smell the bougainvilla.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this corn more than I did. Snowy haired and brown as burned butter, Mr. Clooney looks great barefoot and topless, and it’s nice to see him play warmth as well as wit. He rarely has the chance to take on a role that requires something more than enigmatic winks and smug grins, and as his hair grays and his lines deepen, his trademark charm seems more genuine. But I found the film’s moments of pathos every bit as unconvincing as the bigger picture of a man who learns late-life redemption through guilt, and I found Mr. Clooney’s tears and sentimentality especially clumsy. It’s hard to fault him because he works so hard to distance himself from his usual two-fisted fictions, but he fails to engineer a consistently mature characterization from start to finish. He seems to be more concerned with having a good time on a Hawaiian holiday. An attempt is made to capture a truthful crumbling of manly composure about what is happening in his wasted life, but during his big crying scene on a bridge, the camera is on his back. It’s as though Mr. Payne didn’t feel he was entirely up to the emotional demands in the closeups. In other places, the literary roots (a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings) show. It’s not a great adaptation. (The movie claims to do for Hawaii what Sideways did for the vineyards of California’s Santa Ynez Valley, but don’t believe it. South Pacific, The Hawaiians and the Esther Williams musical Pagan Love Song did a great deal more to put Hawaii on the map.)

Sometimes the screenplay works. At other times, Mr. Payne’s awkward dialogue (co-written with Nat Faxon and Jim Rash) only provokes laughter in the wrong places. In the pivotal moment where Mr. Clooney disconnects the tubes on Liz’s life-support system, the tense emotional pull in the scene is interrupted by the arrival of “the other woman,” distraughtly sobbing, “I forgive you for trying to destroy my family!” The scene is so embarrassing that the impact is strangely hilarious. For the most part, I liked George Clooney as a complacent, one-dimensional corporate beach bum who discovers the value of family love and gets roughed emotionally. But the movie does not always support his good intentions. The result is a slighter, airier piece of prime-time soap opera fluff (think Falcon Crest, Dallas and Knot’s Landing) than director Payne seems to have intended.

rreed@observer.com

THE DESCENDANTS

Running Time 115 minutes

Written by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon

Directed by Alexander Payne

Starring George Clooney, Judy Greer and Matthew Lillard

2.5/4