George Clooney doesn't put a foot wrong except on purpose in "The Descendants," a pitch-perfect movie that threads a microscopically tiny needle between high comedy and devastating drama.

Clooney's misstep, if you can call it that, occurs when his character, Matt King, makes a pivotal discovery and high-tails it to a neighbor's house with all the physical grace of a just- castrated ostrich. Clooney's syncopated, ungainly run has been replayed to death in trailers and advertisements for "The Descendants," suggesting that it's all slapstick buffoonery and "Little Miss Sunshine" dysfunction.

In reality, the film is much more than that: a tough, tender, observant, exquisitely nuanced portrait of mixed emotions at their most confounding and profound – all at play within a deliciously damp, un-touristy Hawaii that's at once lush and lovely to look at, even while stripped of its most insultingly idealized tropes.

Is "The Descendants" a laugh-out-loud comedy? Or a multihankie melodrama? An escapist star vehicle or scruffy indie road trip movie? Larger than life or completely true to it? The answer, gratifyingly, is yes.

Most people are familiar with cognitive dissonance, the ability to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. "The Descendants" is an ode to emotional dissonance, wherein regret and antic humor can coexist and even share a drink; it's a tricky tonal high-wire act that writer-director Alexander Payne, working from Kaui Hart Hemmings' novel, pulls off with uncommon skill and aplomb.

King, as Clooney's voice tells us in a narration, is the wealthy descendant of Hawaiian royalty, a privileged native of the islands who as the movie opens is watching his wife, Elizabeth, lie comatose in a hospital bed after suffering a near-fatal boating accident. A distant husband and father, Matt must find a way to bond with his daughters, 10-year-old Scottie (Amara Miller) and 17-year-old Alex (Shailene Woodley), the first of whom has a penchant for flipping her dad the bird, while the latter is spending her boarding school years in a cloud of permanent rage and incipient alcoholism.

While Matt contemplates the meaning of his family's heritage, he also makes hilariously flawed attempts to create a future with what might be a new, if unwelcome, family configuration, as his wife hovers in a vegetative state her friends and family won't acknowledge.

As Payne has done in his previous films ("Citizen Ruth," "Election," "About Schmidt," "Sideways"), he has assembled a consistently outstanding cast.

THE DESCENDANTS

four stars

Cast: George Clooney, Shailene Woodley, Amara Miller, Robert Forster, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer

Director: Alexander Payne

115 minutes

Rated R (contains profanity, including sexual references)

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