At 18 nominations and counting, Meryl Streep is in a class of her own when it comes to the Oscars. One of these days she ought to do the decent thing and take herself out of contention, but until then the advent of awards season goes hand in hand with the arrival of another mantelpiece threatening role for the veteran performer. At this point it doesn’t actually matter if the film itself is any good or not (of the nine movies she’s been nominated for since 1995, only Spike Jonze’s Adaptation is really worthy of revisiting), it’s simply a delivery system for ‘The Performance’. And so it is in August: Osage County, where Streep is less an actress than a sort of tactical nuclear device. Just point her in the general direction of the set and hope the rest of the cast don’t get caught in the blast radius.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by Tracy Letts, which comfortably breached the three hour mark on stage, August: Osage County has by necessity been somewhat truncated for the screen and now comes in at a comparatively sprightly 120 minutes. Letts has previously enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with William Friedkin, who adapted early plays Bug and Killer Joe with blackly comic verve, but here he’s working with John Wells, a TV vet who has failed to demonstrate any real personality as a maker of feature films. Unfortunately the lack of a strong guiding hand is readily apparent in the bland final product.
The film is set in the “hot, flat nothing” of Oklahoma, where the various members of the Weston family convene after their father, a once successful poet and currently successful drunk, goes missing. Streep plays Violet, the cancer-stricken matriarch who swallows pills by the handful and dispenses withering insults in between drags on an ever present cigarette. She’s a poisonous creation and the actress pulls out every trick in the book to do justice to the role, slurring and sneering, alternately raging and pitiful, her venomous gaze hidden behind oversized sunglasses. Julia Roberts has the second largest part as eldest daughter Barb, but apart from a memorable third act explosion her main role is to look tight-lipped and disapproving while Streep chews up the scenery. She doesn’t stand a chance poor thing.
In the rare moments when Streep is not doing something outrageous, the remainder of the overextended cast jostle desperately for screen time with most of them struggling to make any impression at all. Julianne Nicholson hits a nice note of quiet desperation as stay at home daughter Ivy, and Chris Cooper has a weary dignity as a long-suffering uncle horrified by the family he’s married into, but most of the rest can be summed up by a single adjective. You’ve got Ewan McGregor (whiny), Abigail Breslin (whiny junior), Benedict Cumberbatch (mumbly), Juliette Lewis (shouty) and Dermot Mulroney (sleazy).
There are have been some perfunctory attempts made at opening the play up visually, but aside from a few driving scenes we are mostly stuck in the ancestral home, a rambling pile that’s perpetually sunk in shadow. It’s an unpleasant, claustrophobic experience and despite the significant reduction in length from the stage version you feel every minute of the two hours. Ultimately the film plays out as a struggle between the populist instincts of Wells and Letts’ darker preoccupations. Their warring approaches are summed up by the film’s closing moments, where the original play’s pitch black denouement is followed by a needlessly optimistic coda, and the ridiculous end credits, in which cheerful sepia-tinted photos of this fatally dysfunctional family play out to the strains of the Kings of Leon in twangy country-rock mode. It’s an absurd capper to a misguided project which will go down as another forgettable footnote to Streep’s remarkable Oscar run.
Fuzzy Lamentations 