Star-studded cast brings vitrolic rapport to “August: Osage County.”
“August: Osage County” is a two-hour film based on Tracy Letts’ three-and-a-half-hour Tony and Pulitzer-prize-winning play. Sam Shepard plays Beverly Weston, a poet whose bitter wife, Violet (Meryl Streep), is dying of mouth cancer. Finding himself unable to deal with the matriarch’s pill-popping and bursts of anger, Weston gets up and leaves one day, hiring Native American housekeeper and nurse Johnna (Misty Upham) to look after his wife. When Weston does not come back, she calls on her dysfunctional (to say the least) family for help.
After the family gathers, Beverly is found dead in a possible suicide. The funeral brings together a large group of characters that have not seen each other for years: Beverly and Violet’s daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), along with her husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), whom she is separated from, and their daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin); daughter Ivy (Julianne Nicholson); daughter Karen (Juliette Lewis) with her newest boyfriend, Steve (Dermot Mulroney); and Violet’s sister Mattie Fae Aiken (Margo Martindale), along with her husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) and their son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch).
Not having seen the play, I have to judge the film on its own terms without knowing the original source material. Without question, the film, adapted by the playwright himself, holds true to the play’s reputation for brilliantly vicious and profane dialogue. The characters, a group of intelligent but highly broken family members, quarrel and exchange incredibly hurtful and nasty words. It comes off as a mix of Edward Albee’s “Who Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party.” From reading about the play and my gut feelings, the film seems to be less of a black comedy than the play – though there are a lot of laughs throughout the film, it has a serious tone.
There are many exceptional performances in the film, especially by Streep and Roberts. Neither is especially subtle most of the time, but it is a joy to watch them go at each other. Ewan McGregor is not necessarily miscast as much as he is underused. One of the main losses when compressing a mammoth play into a two-hour film is deeper character development. Unfortunately, a number of the characters are defined by a single character flaw or are little more than vehicles for plot points. They are not so much fully formed characters as mouthpieces spewing pain and bile and plot devices. Particularly underwritten are the characters of Bill and Little Charles. The original play in its entirety surely fleshed out all the characters with more nuance and depth.
Two of Tracy Letts’ plays have been adapted to the screen before, “Bug” and “Killer Joe,” and both were directed by William Friedkin (“The Exorcist”). While those films are much more skeezy and brutal, “August” is still dark and mean by most standards. For some people, watching a group of people yell at each other for two hours does not sound like a good time at the movies. For others, including myself, it is a delight to witness such hell.