Krishna
This is a family drama. There is not even much drama. These kind of movies were popular in the eighties, where you get served a slice of life, to watch and savour. Not a whole lot happens in the movie, and while there are some interesting moments, you come out of it kind of wondering what the point of all that movie was.
The story is about a rich family who owns a lot of property in Hawaii. The paradisaical locales are breathtaking, and as uniquely Hawaiian as it gets. The roads that they travel in, the cottages and houses they visit, the beaches that they pretend they own (I mean, according to the story, they do own the beach and surrounding woodland but…) are all fantastic to watch. The cinematography is great and captures the scenes in vivid detail.
That’s about it. Let’s look at the story.
Matt King is a successful attorney in Hawaii (Honolulu to be precise) and is also a descendant of an ancient royal family and owns about 25000 acres of pristine land through a trust. His wife Elizabeth gets into an accident while water skiing and is in a coma. His whole family seems to have been fully dysfunctional up to that point.
Matt and Elizabeth have two daughters, and the elder one Alex is living in a dormitory. Matt had no time to give Elizabeth or the girls up to the time of the accident and when he goes to get Alex home, he discovers that she is fully into self-destructive behaviour, with alcohol, drugs and a completely insensitive idiot of a boyfriend, whom she insists on dragging back into Matt’s house.
Scottie, the younger one, is clueless on everything in life and simply seems to float along. We are supposed to feel total sympathy for her not being aware of how critical her mother’s condition is. Does not fully work.
Now, when the doctor tells Matt that Elizabeth will never come out of the coma, he faces the uncertain future. Alex tells him that Elizabeth was having an affair and was also planning to marry her lover, after seeking and getting a divorce from Matt. The news devastates Matt and he is now obsessed with finding who that man was. He learns from friends that it was Matt Speer and tracks him down to his house, only to learn that he has gone to Kau’ai. He follows with his entire family in toe, including the crazy boyfriend.
Well we learn of the hard feelings between Elizabeth’s dad and Matt, learn how Sid is married and had no intention of giving up his wife for Elizabeth.
Finally, Matt decides to “forgive” both the lover and his wife. He changes his mind on the sale of the property. He was originally planning to sell it. The added detail is that the realtor who stood to make a great amount of money out of it was the lover of his wife. But that does not seem to be the motive for not selling. The desire is to not spoil the beauty by allowing condominiums and hotels built on the pristine land.
The movie is OK but there is no plot in it except ‘When the wife dies, how did this family cope? What brought them together?’ Not much of an attention grabber, is it?
I would say a 3/10
– – Krishna