Actors George Clooney and Shailene Woodley in the 2011 film 'The Descendants.'  The film, directed by Alexander Payne (of 'Sideways' fame), is a melodrama-with-comedy based on the 2007 novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings.  The New York Times called the novel "a Pandora’s box-style tragicomedy in which a swirl of emotional debris is flung at the narrator, who is smashed and pounded and yet each time rises to be smashed and pounded again."