incest

August: Osage County (2013)

André Crous

A drugged-up Meryl Streep goes on a two-hour rant, but gradually the onion’s many layers are peeled back.

august-osage-countyUSA
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.

Shame (2011)

André Crous

Steve McQueen’s second film is all about one man’s sexual desire and what he does to get what he craves.

shame-mcqueenUK/USA
3*

Director:
Steve McQueen
Screenwriters:
Steve McQueen
Abi Morgan
Director of Photography:
Sean Bobbitt

Running time: 100 minutes

He looks them up and down, everywhere he goes: women, men, couples – they all find him seductive. He goes after them, and he gets what he wants, every time.

Shame is the story of Brandon Sullivan, a young executive who is the poster boy for unapologetic hedonism until he is confronted with the more serious demands of intimacy from two women in his life: his sister and a co-worker looking for more than a fling.

In one of the first scenes of the film, Sullivan watches a young woman sitting opposite him on the New York subway. She returns his gaze, clearly enjoying the attention, though trying to hide her excitement in this public space. At the next stop, she gets up and grabs onto the pole next to him: She is wearing a wedding ring. But he doesn’t relent and instead pursues her down the tunnels of the underground.

Brandon is physically in very good shape, clean-cut and well-coiffed and has a good job downtown and an apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, but the ever-present windows and glass dividers separate him from the rest of civilization. He is used to being in charge of his life, and especially his sex life: He prefers to pay for sex in his own apartment or seek it out in public spaces, where people can be easily discarded but never permits a greater measure of intimacy. When he is not out in bars looking for fun, he sits in his spotless apartment and masturbates in front of his computer screen. He is young and enjoys one-night stands and the general remoteness of his sex partners, sometimes a world away in front of a webcam.

He is forward without being aggressive and plays off his good looks and charm; he knows how to speak to a woman, and almost always he benefits from a comparison with his womanising boss, David. David compliments himself as a way to pick up girls, while Brandon compliments the girls themselves and is much more successful than his pal, even when David is the one doling out one pickup line after another.

Brandon’s bachelor lifestyle is upended, however, when his drama-queen sister, Sissy, arrives to stay with him for a few nights. Not only does she invade his privacy and walk in on him while he’s polishing his family jewels in the bathroom, but she represents a genuine attack on his licentious way of living. The very first evening at his place, she spends hours crying on the phone while she speaks to her boyfriend, telling him how much she loves him. It goes without saying this is the kind of debasement of which Brandon would never allow himself to be a victim.

The relationship between Brandon and his needy sister is evidently a toxic one, and there are hints of a traumatic childhood that are never elaborated on. The tension between them is made all the more agonising by the use of very long takes, one of director Steve McQueen’s trademarks. We know this situation won’t end well, but until the end we have no idea where all of this is headed.

One reason for our disorientation is the structure of the film. At various intervals, McQueen expertly weaves together two, sometimes three different storylines and timeframes to create a mystery guided by our impressions. These obscurities are sometimes quickly resolved and add another level of slight discomfort to the proceedings on-screen.

Shame is McQueen’s second feature film, and while it is in many respects more conventional than his début masterpiece, Hunger, in which Michael Fassbender (who plays the lead in Shame) starred as the Irish republican Bobby Sands, the director doesn’t nail the material the way one would have expected. Technically, the film is beyond reproach, but unlike Hunger, which is set almost entirely inside the Maze prison outside Belfast, the technical aspects of Shame do not engender an experience capable of encompassing an equally flaccid narrative, this time set all over New York City.

There are moments of cinematic grandeur, but the film is also the victim of the director’s fear of explaining too much, and, in the end, too much is left unsaid and unshown. That is a real shame.