What does it mean when a girl goes to see a George Clooney movie and ends up more interested in the scenery?  The Descendants was shot on the Hawaiian islands of Oahu and Kaui, where the story unfolds.  Everyone you see on screen roams around in flip-flops, shorts, and bikini tops or flowered shirts, surrounded by hibiscus bushes and palm trees.  But I never got a deep sense of the landscape, of what it’s like to live in the tropics, surrounded by crazily blue waters, nestled within valleys that are older than time.  In Hawaiian cities life unfurls below the volcanic hills, that lie all around like sleeping giants.  I worked on two shops in Honolulu International Airport years ago and to distinguish them everyone (executives, construction workers, shopgirls) called them Diamond Head and Ewa, because they faced the sides of the island where those volcanoes are.  People used the formations to orient themselves, the same way New Yorkers once used the Twin Towers.

To signal when the action in The Descendants shifts from one island to the next, there’s an old-fashioned movie map of the archipelago, with a curved dotted line that stretches from one island to the next.  As we walked out of the movie I complained to my friend that Kaui had a different landscape than Oahu, with different volcanoes, but that the movie hadn’t shown them to us.  “How are we supposed to know when we’re on one island or the other?"  I asked.  "When we see it on the map,” he deadpanned.  The characters in the movie run around, haplessly and attractively, on brochure-pretty beaches and in sprawling houses with overstuffed furniture.  Where are mountains and skies that preside over the beaches and cities, and over their lives?