AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY  3.3***

 

 To begin with, this is a very dreary movie….. not dreadful,  but dreary and sad. It may be the only movie you’ll ever see with Julia Roberts without her million dollar smile. There is no smiling, no joy and no feel-good in this movie.

 

It  is  the story about the Weston family. A family that gives new meaning to the word “dysfunctional”…it  puts it on a new level of bitterness and heartbreak. It begins with the disappearance of patriarch Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) which  serves as the emergency that brings the family together at the family home in Osage County in the  hot month of August. Grief and uncertainty have seemingly little impact on Violet (Meryl Streep), his bitter, cancer-stricken wife with an unholy dependence on prescription drugs and cigarettes.  In what one soon gathers is characteristic form, Streep doles out bile and loathing to her three daughters: strong-willed Barbara (Julia Roberts), whose marriage to writer Bill (Ewan McGregor) is slowly disintegrating; dutiful Ivy (Julianne Nicholson),who has been living at home with her parents but has finally decided on a better future with her cousin Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch); and flighty Karen (Juliette Lewis), who turns up with her new sleazy businessman-fiancé Steve (Dermot Mulroney) in tow.

 

The blistering portrait of a family in breakdown comes sharply into focus, cracks and all,  when Streep presides over a post-funeral dinner-table sequence, both tension-filled and horrifying, a sequence that may be one of the most exhilarating, awful scenes you'll ever see constructed out of insults, secrets and shame. Streep hurls abuse at each of her family members with the expertise of experience, switching from poisonous to sympathetic in a beat of her hateful, broken heart. They react in varying ways: Roberts with a white-hot rage, Nicholson with a tremulous sweetness that explains why she never managed to free herself from her mother's strangling grasp and Lewis with a “ love cures all” response  which is ridiculous since she’s a dingbat who has been desperately looking for love, usually in all the wrong places.

 

Meryl Streep gives one of the best performances of the year as the pill-popping, mean old lady who is constantly bullying her family members until she can't possibly torment them anymore. The things her character says are gut-wrenching but Streep's performance is so soulfully heartbreaking that you can almost forgive her. She certainly earned her Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Julia Roberts gives a very simple, brutally raw performance as  the strong-willed daughter.  She's an un-glamorous spectacle to see  and is deserving of her Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. The rest of the ensemble is incredible as well regardless of their screen time

 

As good as the performances are they don't outshine some flaws in  the movie.  The drama is at times too heavy-handed to the point where it pounds you over the head when a slap in the face would suffice.

 

A good way to describe this movie is that if movies could have babies, and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woof" had a baby with "The Big Chill" and that baby grew up and sold its soul to the Devil, that movie would be "August: Osage County." This is ensemble human misery unveiled, pulled open wide, and made more poignant by how well it is done. Consider yourself warned.

 

Rated R for language including sexual references, and for drug material.

 

Clark