MOVIE REVIEW: August: Osage County

Erron’s grade: A+

Target Audience:

Lovers of dysfunctional family dramas featuring strong ensemble casts; films set in nontraditional locales; films entirely devoid of explosions, gunfire and car chases; film dialogue that is both well-written and sharp witted; female-centric storytelling

The Review:

 August: Osage County—based on the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts (who also wrote the film’s screenplay)— introduces us to the Weston family of Pawhuska, Oklahoma.  The film is an exploration of cancers, addictions and the varied ways in which family members wound each other.  On one level there’s the mouth cancer that afflicts the Weston family’s matriarch, Violet, portrayed with trademark mastery by Meryl Streep.  On an emotional level there are the myriad family secrets that have become their own malignancy for Violet and her three daughters:  Barbara (Julia Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen (Juliette Lewis). 

In the wake of a family tragedy (or was it an inevitability?) Violet gathers her daughters and other members of the extended family together at the Weston clan’s Northern Oklahoma homestead.  It is within these confines that Streep’s Violet can truly hold court and—unable to do much about her oral cancer besides descending deeper into an addiction on pills—Violet attempts to deal with the malignancy of secrets afflicting her family through truth telling that is both venomous and eviscerating.  Of the stage character Violet Weston, critic Charles Isherwood wrote “…she has a tongue that could flay a horse at 10 paces.”  The same can be said of Streep’s incarnation.  And oh, how exhilarating it is to watch Meryl Streep work!  Her Violet careens from an incoherent addict stumbling around the house in a bathrobe, to a semi-sober and more appropriately coiffed materfamilias who insists that all the males sitting at the dinner table rise and put on their suit coats because, “I thought we were having a funeral dinner not a cockfight.”  This film belongs to Streep and she carries most of its emotional gravitas in a performance that was every bit worthy of the Academy Award nomination that she received. 

The film’s emotional centerpiece unfolds in the second act during the aforementioned dinner scene at which the film’s large ensemble cast (which includes the likes of Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ewan McGregor) has gathered.  No one at the dinner table is safe from the acerbic tongue lashings and truth telling generously ladled out by Violet.  Only her eldest daughter, Barbara, dares to address head on the scathing observations with which Violet carpet bombs her dinner guests.  Throughout this tour-de-force scene we get to really see beneath each of the character’s veneers and we, the audience, derive as much pleasure from watching it all unravel as Violet does by playing ringmaster.  All of the actors in this scene, and in all of the scenes in August: Osage County, are at the top of their game.  If you like watching skilled performers give their finest, then this film simply cannot be missed.

If Streep provides the film with its emotional timbre, its soul lives in Julia Roberts’ simply sublime performance as Barbara.  We get to see Roberts without the advantage of that megawatt smile and trademark curls in a vanity-free performance that covers a broad emotional spectrum from quiet introspection to raging lunacy.  It is one of the film’s great joys that we get to experience along with Barbara the realization that she is extremely well-suited to go toe-to-toe with her mother because Barbara is—quite honestly—much like Violet.  This is a fact that both infuriates Barbara and makes her most-capable of comprehending the cancers that afflict the Weston family.  It is Barbara that gets real with her mother about Violet’s addiction to prescription medications, while in true Weston family fashion, failing to appropriately address her teenage daughter’s (Abigail Breslin) pot habit.  Roberts gets many wonderful “moments” in the film, including one with the Breslin character, where Barbara begs her daughter to not die before she does.  It’s a small moment in the back of a car, but Roberts hits all the right notes as a mother who is facing mortality with an awkwardness that feels completely real and relatable.  There is one scene in particular that my mind returns to.  It’s another car scene with Roberts in profile.  The ambient light is illuminating the wrinkles on her face and the weariness in her eyes and we gain insight into a middle aged woman reluctantly forced back into her dysfunctional family’s gravity well, staring down a road that she is none too happy to travel.  That all of this plays across Roberts’ face without any dialogue is testament to the mastery of her craft and director John Wells’ ability to let the characters inhabit space in a very organic way.

At this point in my review, you have undoubtedly decided whether or not August: Osage County is your kind of movie.  I hope you will give it a good viewing, because it’s a worthy film, and I don’t give out A+ grades to many movies.  I would also want you to know that this is not a joyless film devoid of humor.  There are great moments that are worthy of chuckles and others that elicit downright guffaws, as in the scene where the three Weston sisters discuss their mother’s rather “unique” technique for smuggling drugs into a rehab facility.  The humor in this film is expertly juxtaposed against the more dramatic moments and it helps to imbue August: Osage County with a richness of experience that makes you glad you came for the funeral and all the more thankful that you get to leave this place and go home, back to your own life that is hopefully, well, more hopeful.