AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY – The Review

Unlike the play, the film version of Tracy Letts’ AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY won’t win any awards. It’s a flatly-directed, stagey melodrama full of overripe family dynamics, characters screeching at each other, and over-the-top revelations, all which had to have worked better on stage. But the film does offer up some juicy acting, superb back-and-forth dialogue, and a few hearty laughs, so if you can adjust those Pulitzer Prize expectations, there is much to enjoy.

Cancer, alcoholism, drug addiction, adultery, incest. The list of pathologies afflicting one or another of the Westons, the family at the center of AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, is seemingly endless (and overly familiar). Meryl Streep stars as Violet Weston, the sharp-tongued matriarch of the dysfunctional Oklahoma clan. Early in the film, Violet’s exhausted husband Beverly (Sam Sheppard) walks off, never to be heard from again. The couple’s three adult daughters are called back to the family homestead, husbands (or boyfriends) in tow, to comfort poor Violet in her time of need and it’s soon revealed that Beverly’s committed suicide in a nearby lake. The mousy Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) lives nearby and resents the responsibility she’s had to take for watching over the horror of her parents’ latter years, and has never married, although she is secretly carrying on a love affair with her first cousin Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the oldest and toughest of the daughters, returns with her newly estranged husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), and their sardonic, pot-smoking teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin). The youngest Weston girl, Karen (Juliette Lewis), arrives later accompanied by her oily fiancé, Steve (Dermot Mulroney), spouting self-help platitudes about her recently rehabilitated love life. Surrounded by her extended family — which also includes her abrasive sister, Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale), and Mattie Fae’s henpecked husband, Charlie (Chris Cooper), Violet has cancer of the mouth, an especially ironic disease for a woman who has used her hurtful tongue to terrorize her family, and a serious addiction to all kinds of pills, self-medicated to the point of childish hysterics. Over sweet tea and fried food, Vi gets ready to announce who will inherit her late husband’s estate, but first she feels the need to psychologically torture her family, one by one, taking revenge for the miseries of her own life by picking at the scabs of everyone else’s. Her opponent in all of this is Barbara, who is dealing with the breakdown of her own family, lending her character drama.

Streep has the juiciest role in AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY and no one else in the cast stands a chance (though Chris Cooper gets a couple of big laughs). Violet has to all at once be high on pills, on withdrawal from pills, making snarky jokes to her family, and grieving her husband’s death all while actually trying to hold the family together by making everyone feel like crap. Streep commands every scene and dominates every confrontation, but it’s the type of scenery-chewing that may have worked better before a live audience. She comes off as such a despicable shrew, it’s all a bit unrealistic. The film version has condensed the play, which ran three hours on stage but director John Wells’ idea of ‘opening up’ the story is having Julia Roberts recite some of her lines while driving around in her car. AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY as a film makes me want to see the play – and I’m not sure what kind of praise that is.

3 of 5 Stars

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY opens in St. Louis Friday January 10th at (among other places) Landmark’s Tivoli Theater