George Clooney Running, Kaui King, Kaui Hart Hemmings, And Love

Native Kentuckian George Clooney was four years old when Kaui King, a son of Native Dancer destined to turn gray as he matured, won the Kentucky Derby in 1965.

Now a bit gray himself, Clooney can still run.  In The Descendants, after he discovers that his wife may have been cheating on him, Clooney makes an emotional run to his neighbor's house, where he is going to try to either verify or discredit what his daughter has told him.  This running scene is not in the book, though author Kaui Hart Hemmings achieves the same effect, with equal understatement and humor.

As Clooney's character, Matthew King, awakens to the truth, he also begins to awaken or reawaken to the nature of love and responsibility.  It is a fine book and a fine movie, one in which the author was cast as King's secretary.

What we talk about when we talk about love depends upon our personal experience.  Those Ayn Rand psychopaths incapable of love think that all lovers are simply faking it or else stupidly confusing love with pseudo-sentimentality and desire.  Young love is often possessive love, an extension of the ego.  Mature love is unconditional, as Shakespeare wrote of it in the sonnets, an unchanging love which does not alter when alteration is found.

Matthew King's run in the movie is in character, showing a man who has let himself go in important ways, a man who needs to catch up to himself and rediscover what is important in life.  George Clooney plays it beautifully, but I doubt if Clooney himself is in such sad shape as some critics have suggested.

Even us old guys can run a bit, some of us.  And some of us have learned how to love.