IN THE DESCENDANTS KING KAMEHAMEHA’S DESCENDANTS ARE ALL HAOLES, RACIALLY & CULTURALLY!
Director Alexander Payne has miscast major characters in his adaptation of the 2007 novel by part-Hawaiian Kaui Hart Hemmings. Matthew King (played by George Clooney), trustee of an estate that owns many acres of undeveloped land on Kaua‘i, is about to sell the land to developers (to the chagrin of a Native Hawaiian woman who insists that one of his daughters should show proper respect at school). The estate was created by his forebear, a man surnamed King who married a daughter of Kamehameha I some 150 years earlier, and the estate will elapse in seven years. King’s wife Elizabeth is in a coma and near death, disheartening relatives, none of whom visibly have any trace of Native Hawaiian ancestry. Their only affinity with Native Hawaiian culture is to drop Elizabeth’s remains along with leis into the ocean while in a canoe. The screenplay deals sensitively with a family tragedy that could have taken place in Nebraska, where Payne was born–in other words giving a false impression of the Islands. But so have many haole (Caucasian) writers—from Jack London to Somerset Maugham. Trying to make Hawai‘i seem like just another of the fifty states is, in this reviewer’s opinion, an error rooted in racism. Aside from authentic music, the Hawai‘i of Chinese, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Native Hawaiians, Portuguese, and mixed-race residents practicing the Aloha Spirit eludes Payne and Hemmings, an adoptee of the famous haole surfer who in one recent interview admitted some ignorance of her own cultural background. MH