The film opens with his thrill-loving wife Elizabeth (Patricia Hastie) in a boating accident off Waikiki Beach. Matt has been involved in land management; he holds the controlling share of his extended family's estate. Elizabeth has run their own family, raising their daughters: the teenager Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) and the younger Scottie (Amara Miller). Now Elizabeth is in a coma, and her living will instructs Matt to remove life support. Alexandra returns home from boarding school, and Matt becomes a single parent while also dealing with the King family's urgent desire to close the multi-million-dollar land deal.

This is big business, emotional and financial. Just because the lawyers wear short-sleeved Reyn Spooner shirts doesn't make them pushovers. Matt's life is further complicated when he discovers from an unexpected source that his wife had been having an affair. And his daughters don't want him to sell the land, where they must often have wandered as children. Leading the push for the King family is Cousin Hugh (Beau Bridges). Hugh, who is as affable as Bridges can be, doesn't want to listen to any woo-hoo nonsense about not selling.

The story is based on a novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, the daughter of a famous surfer and politician. Reading her bio, I suspect that there must be a lot of her in Alexandra and Scottie. Matt King himself thinks he will probably sell, but now everything is in upheaval. An undercurrent, which Payne wisely keeps subtle, is that perhaps Matt lost touch with his wife and daughters after first losing his special bond to the land.

Payne's films are usually about people forced into difficult personal decisions. Do you remember Laura Dern in "Citizen Ruth" (1996)? He always carefully establishes his lead characters in a matrix of supporting characters who are given weight and complexity, so we feel the pressures they're experiencing. Here there is Scott Thorson (Robert Forster), his father-in-law, a flinty, self-confident man who perhaps always has had doubts about Matt. Also, there are the man Elizabeth was having the affair with, Brian Speer (Matthew Lillard) and — here it gets thorny — Brian's wife, Julie (Judy Greer).