August: Osage County (Streep/Roberts) – Film Review

A stagey, sub-Tennessee Williams family drama unfolds as all the skeletons come out of the closet when nasty, cancer-stricken, dysfunctional matriarch Violet Weston (Meryl Streep)’s family gather at their Oklahoma house for the patrirch’s funeral after her understandably exhausted husband Beverly (Sam Shepard) kills himself.

There’s far too much acting going on in director John Wells’s movie, much of it OTT and misjudged. These performances would probably work on stage but not in huge close-up as here. On the big screen, a facial twitch or blink of the eye can provide huge drama. We don’t need all this emoting and shouting. We’re in Osage County, not Italy!

Bizarrely Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts (as her equally unpleasant daughter, Barbara, the apple didn’t fall far from that tree) are Oscar nominated as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress for their showy but untruthful-seeming, floridly actory performances. Just looking ancient or sounding angry is brave bit it isn’t, in itself, actual acting.

Margo Martindale as the tough nut Mattie Fae, Julianne Nicholson as the nice daughter Ivy and Dermot Mulroney as charming, feckless Steve Huberbrecht are better, down to earth and approaching reality somewhere, and of course Shepard is good in his tiny bit. However,  the best performances come, perhaps surprisingly with all this star power competition, from Chris Cooper and Juliette Lewis, both of them really quite subtle, low key and touching. Two Brits, Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch seem uncomfortable and not entirely convincing in this very American setting, but they acquit themselves well enough.

Tracy Letts’s screenplay from his own play provides some amusingly acidic entertainment, but sometimes it plays like a parody of a Tennessee Williams play, with all the problems a family could have simply taken down off the shelf, cobwebs cleaned off a bit and then ticked off, done and dusted. Nevertheless, Letts was awarded the 2008 Tony Award for Best Original Play for August: Osage County, which was first performed at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago and then at the Imperial Theatre in New York. He also won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for it. The bitchy lines of dialogue, like the performances, could work their spell on stage, I guess.

The main problem with August: Osage County, though, is that unfortunately, this is such a nasty bunch of folks, you really don’t feel like spending any time with them.

But then, hey, it’s got two actress Oscar nominations, a Tony and Pulitzer behind it, and The Daily Mail says (quoting from the poster) ‘Streep is mesmerising… Roberts is outstanding.’

(C) Derek Winnert 2014 derekwinnert.com