You’ll believe a man can fly!” ran the ad campaign for the original Christopher Reeve Superman. How quaint that sounds today, when movies try to make us believe in far wilder things: in planet-killing asteroids, in automobiles that transform into giant robots, in a hundred kinds of superheroes — and now, with Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, in the idea that a woman would cheat on George Clooney with Matthew Lillard.

If the latter name doesn’t ring a bell, then you probably weren’t a teenager in the late 1990s, when Lillard — long of body and rubbery of face, like a faintly …