Reunited and it feels so crude

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.

                

From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.