A drugged-up Meryl Streep goes on a two-hour rant, but gradually the onion’s many layers are peeled back.
USA
3.5*
Director:
John Wells
Screenwriter:
Tracy Letts
Director of Photography:
Adriano Goldman
Running time: 120 minutes
August in Osage County can be scorching – with temperatures in the 90s (mid-30s in degrees Celsius) – but even in the sweltering heat, there is nothing that is quite as oppressive as the atmosphere around the Weston household.
In August: Osage County, the matriarch is Violet (Meryl Streep), who has been popping pills on a regular basis for a long time and was recently treated for mouth cancer. Her hair is short, and she stumbles from room to room speaking her mind (or “truth”, as she calls it) and lobbing insults at the small group of people one would call her family.
The man who has put up with her the longest is her husband, Beverly (Sam Shepard), whose opening words, “Life is very long”, taken from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”, suggest to us that he has had enough of this and that this will be his last time round the prickly pear. By the time the subsequent opening credits sequence finishes, he will have disappeared forever from this earth.
With the departure of their father, the three daughters arrive at the house deep in the Osage Plains, in north Oklahoma, to pay their respects to an individual who, although a heavy drinker, was also a very good man, especially so because he put up with Violet for so long.
Barbara (Julia Roberts), her father’s favourite – a point that elicits particular scorn from her own mother – arrives with her teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin), and husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), from whom she has unofficially separated.
Ivy (a captivating Julianne Nicholson), a diffident, freckled girl who has recently decided to straighten her hair, is the only daughter who has stayed behind to take care of the elder Westons, for which she has not received any kind of financial or emotional support from anyone.
And then there is Karen (Juliette Lewis), the youngest, who lives in Florida and doesn’t stop talking about her fiancé, the Ferrari-driving Steve (Dermot Mulroney), who will take her to Belize on their honeymoon. Steve is nearing 50, but we notice he has his eye on the 14-year-old Jean.
The film does not have the most original of plots, as this family gathering inevitably leads to countless revelations, the one more stunning than the last, until there is little more to do except to head off into the taboo territory of incest. As is to be expected, Streep sucks all the oxygen out of the room when she speaks, but she accomplishes more than that: In this film, she also sucks all the light out of the room, as her sharp tongue lashes everyone around her. “Nobody slips anything by me”, she says, and she is right, but when she decides to reveal others’ secrets, we cringe because we know she is deliberately stepping over the line to make the point that she is a know-it-all.
Director John Wells’s adaptation of Tracy Letts’s play (Letts also crafted the screenplay) keeps most of the story indoors, and he fashions this space to resemble a cave, with blinds and curtains drawn, and on the day of the funeral with the women dressed all in black, we only see their heads, and therefore their words sting with so much more power.
There are two exemplary scenes around the dining room table. In the first, on the day of the funeral, Violet, at the head of the table, doesn’t so much speak as gush her mind. It is a gamble that churns our stomachs as her words become more and more inappropriate, and we end up cheering when someone eventually wrestles her to the floor. We are not only angry with her, but also with the rest of the family who by their silence enable her to keep going.
The second scene, with Violet and two of her daughters, is much more interesting, as it involves characters that have become infinitely more complex since we last saw them huddled around the table an hour earlier. This time around, there is a struggle for power and truth, but although there is no clear winner, it is just as painful as before.
August: Osage County is filled with moments where the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet in slow motion. People are hurtful, but even if we don’t empathise with many of them, because their behaviour is at times revolting, we do gradually comprehend that there is more to everyone than what we may perceive at first. People can also be secretive to a fault, and many of the secrets we discover here only lead to heartache and misunderstandings.
But even when there is a torrent of emotions and hysteria, there is still hope. Chris Cooper, who plays Violet’s brother-in-law, is nothing less than a prince, and his character’s love for his son, “Little” Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch), is tender and sweet and beautiful. When it seems like all hope is lost, Charles takes to the piano to sing a love song. He makes the world stand still, and that is when we realise that, even in a family as messed-up as this one, all is not lost.