The two most appealing
characters in August: Osage County are,
alas, barely in the movie, but they’re both in the first scene, in which poet
and patriarch Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) provides Johnna (Misty Upham), his
new housekeeper, with some vital details regarding her employers’ sundry idiosyncrasies
and preferred sources of inebriation, along with a volume of T.S. Eliot. Very
soon after this exchange Beverly will disappear and all his adult children and
their respective families will descend on the Weston’s sepulchral rural Oklahoma
home. The ostensible purpose of this dysfunctional family reunion is to put
collective wits together and discern where “old unfathomable dad” has run off
to. Yet rather early in August you
get the suspicion that what passes for story here is little more than a
platform upon which a great deal of acting is to be displayed and admired. At
least Johnna has something to read. She has her work cut out for her.
Headlining August’s
august ensemble is Meryl Streep as Violent, Beverly’s wife and mother to his
kids, a woman known for cruelty and garrulousness. She has cancer of the mouth,
and while what exits her mouth may not actually be cancerous, it isn’t hard to
imagine how extended exposure to her tirades may contribute to long-term illness.
The excess of meds probably doesn’t help. She blitzed half the time and stoned
the other half. Unsurprisingly, her kids (Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis,
Julianne Nicholson) don’t much like her, though they’ve got problems of their
own, mostly involving men, one of whom is a first-cousin.
The script was adapted by Tracy Letts from his own play. There are intermittently
riveting, venomous moments in the extended groups scenes which help those who
haven’t seen August on stage (myself
included) imagine its darky comic appeal. But the needless transitional scaffolding
surrounding such moments dampens the impact and emphasizes the general air of phoniness.
Letts’ characters invite the sort of expansive performances that might fill a
theatrical space, but in a movie as deeply conventional as this one, they
mostly come off as wearyingly showy. Streep is, to be sure, as fully immersed in this character as in anything she's done, but it’s rare to see her legendary chops
used as such a blunt instrument.
August was helmed by television titan turned feature
director John Wells, a tasteful ham, if you know what I mean. He takes a fundamentally middlebrow
approach to material that pleads to be deeply unsettling. Where director William
Friedkin was only too eager to exploit the grotesque in Letts (see Killer Joe), Wells seems not to have
registered it at all. The cocktail of abuse, incest, racism, adultery, suicide
and madness at the story’s core are softened at every turn. Wells clearly likes
actors but fails to let them dominate; he overwhelms their work with inserts, reaction
shots, ostentatiously poignant framing and, most of all, Gustavo
Santaolalla’s gentle, deeply conventional musical score,
which gets papered over anything that might have otherwise made us uneasy, such
as Violet vomiting by the side of the road or the eerie deployment of Eric
Clapton’s cheerful ‘Law Down Sally.’
It’s
hardly a spoiler to say that the search for dad, like August as a whole, goes nowhere. (This, I think, is intentional.) There are some excellent moments,
and Margo Martindale is very good as Violet’s sister, but mostly this is no
country for nuanced performances or earned catharsis. You can’t really blame
Beverly for walking away from it all.
