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A number of years, ago I did a grim deer-hunting story on a man that went into the woods and didn’t come out alive. I got a call from a game warden about a guy that left his house one afternoon to go deer hunting at a local club he belonged to that was not far from his house in Jasper. The man packed up his gear and told his wife he would be home shortly after dark. When he didn’t return late that evening, his wife called the sheriff’s department, which in turn called a game warden.

Establishing a sense of place is as important to an Alexander Payne movie as the complex characters he crafts. Five years ago it was the wine country of “Sideways,” and before that the plain-spoken Midwest in “About Schmidt.” For his latest film, Payne uses the backdrop of Hawaii, with all its lush landscapes and island sensibilities, but as the main character Matt King (George Clooney) narrates in the beginning, just because it seems like paradise doesn’t mean its residents don’t have problems.