Film Review: “August: Osage County”

If nothing else, “August: Osage County” validates Tolstoy’s
famous dictum about happy versus unhappy families. The Weston family of Osage
County, in the dry, dreary prairies of Oklahoma, actually easily surpasses the
concept of unhappy, achieving a level of dysfunction,
anger, and sheer toxicity rarely shown in motion pictures, or even real life.

The movie begins with a voiceover introduction by the
patriarch, Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), telling a young woman he’s hiring to
look after his wife, Violet (Meryl Streep), about the domestic situation. He
offhandedly lists a dozen or more prescription drugs Violet consumes by the
handful and mentions that he himself finds solace in drink. He disappears from
the picture after that introduction, but prepares the audience for the chaos
that follows.

The Weston family exhibits enough problems of almost every
kind to sustain at least a whole season of a television soap opera. Aside from
alcoholism and drug addiction, the picture trades in such subjects as suicide,
child abuse and molestation, infidelity, divorce, two separate cases of cancer,
incest, and of course a general lack of anything resembling a more or less
normal family life.

Violet, who suffers from what she calls “mouth cancer,” which
suggests something of a double meaning, occupies the central role in the Weston
household, chain smoking, popping pills, and viciously mocking, insulting, and
abusing everyone, with special attention to her three grown daughters, who have
returned for a family crisis. Though on the verge of divorce,
the oldest, Barbara (Julia Roberts), arrives with her husband (Ewan McGregor).
The youngest, Karen (Juliette Lewis), comes with her fiancé, a thrice-divorced
dope named Steve (Dermot Mulroney). The faithful Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) lives
in the decaying home, suffering her mother’s tantrums and self-pity.

The only person Violet spares at all from her constant vituperation,
her sister Mattie (Margo Martindale), harbors a dark secret of her own, which
involves her feckless son Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch)
and his relationship with Ivy. Nobody in the Weston family escapes the
pervasive anguish that the horrible situation generates; as a result, the
characters spend most of their time shouting obscenities at each other, though
none can match Violet’s level of vitriol.

Throughout all the screaming and cursing, the Westons reveal previously unknown chapters of their
individual histories, most of them full of pain engendered by Violet. Violet
herself tells stories of her own suffering in childhood, her sister’s defense
of her against a stepfather’s abuse, and of the brutally impoverished past that
Beverly overcame to become an award-winning poet.

The large cast of well-known stars works together
unselfishly, like a genuine ensemble; even established actors like Ewan
McGregor and Chris Cooper (as Mattie’s husband) play only relatively minor
roles in what is essentially a woman’s picture. As Violet’s sister Mattie,
Margo Martindale seems one of the few sympathetic people in the group, with her
own sad past. Even Benedict Cumberbatch, who is
apparently very hot these days, submerges whatever his appeal may be in the
person of the weak, bumbling Charlie.

Meryl Streep lays on the hysteria and cruelty of the
drug-addicted Violet pretty heavily, stumbling around under the influence of
her medicine cabinet, sneering at everybody, foully insulting the most
vulnerable members of her family, delighting in the general suffering, and
ultimately betraying all her daughters. Perhaps most surprising, Julia Roberts
as Barbara, really the strongest and not incidentally the angriest of the
daughters, occupies most of the screen time in the picture. Dressed plainly,
wearing no make-up, playing a decidedly unglamorous woman, and underacting most
effectively, except for the occasions when she matches her mother’s foul
language with a well-earned bitterness all her own, Roberts is a long way from
the glitter of “Pretty Woman” or the flamboyance of “Erin Brockovich.”

The level of emotion rises too high too often in “August:
Osage County,” seldom diminishing into any kind of normality; like a bad
version of “King Lear,” it starts at a high pitch and never lets up. Tracy
Letts’s play, the source of the film, won the Pulitzer Prize, which indicates
the occasionally dubious value of such awards. On the other hand, Tolstoy might
have liked it.

This article appears in Jan 8-14, 2014.