Review: August: Osage County
January 2014
Tracy Letts’ 2007 award-friendly play gets the bigscreen treatment, with an astonishing cast in memorably horrible form.
In Osage County, Oklahoma, we meet drunk, depressed Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) as he hires Johnna (Misty Upham) to care for his cancersuffering, pill-popping, drama-queen wife Violet (Meryl Streep).
When Beverly winds up dead, the family unites for the funeral and ferocious battles: there’s Violet’s sister Mattie (Margo Martindale), her husband Charlie (Chris Cooper) and their hopeless son ‘Little Charles’ (Benedict Cumberbatch); Violet’s resentful daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), her driftingaway husband Bill (Ewan McGregor) and their fed-up daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin); second daughter Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), quietly furious at being lumped with Mom’s care; and self-obsessed youngest (so to speak) Karen (Juliette Lewis), who brings her fiancé Steve Huberbrecht (Dermot Mulroney), an appealing meathead who has no idea what he’s getting into.
Directed by John Wells (whose The Company Men also features famous faces and a dark edge), this plays at first like a slightly sad character comedy but then turns surprisingly nasty, with Streep portraying about the most poisonous character in her entire career.
Perhaps it’s a mistake to release it over the Christmas period, as many punters don’t want to see this sort of vicious thing onscreen when they can get it at home for free.
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