There is a moment (one of many), when “August: Osage County” goes completely over the edge of sanity. You haven’t lived until you see Julia Roberts screaming at Meryl Streep to, “Eat the fish, bitch.” Much like the rest of “August,” the moment is fraught with aggression and sadness; it’s also hilariously overwrought and over-the-top. The film, adapted from Tracy Letts’ award-winning play, is just too much: too many famous actors, too many weaving plot lines, too many screaming confrontations. The film doesn’t boil over so much as it intermittently explodes, creating a mess that in the end is just too much to clean up.
August: Osage County
B-
The Weinstein Company
Michigan Theater
Streep embodies Violet Weston, the drug-addled, vindictive matriarch of an old Oklahoma family. Violet is not a person so much as a force; Streep pulls out every textbook acting technique, with her warbled voice, exaggerated movements and faux intensity. After her alcoholic husband goes missing, her three daughters and their significant others come to Osage County to console her. The stars shuffle in like cattle — Roberts as her embittered daughter, Barb, Benedict Cumberbatch as the milky cousin, Dermot Mulroney as a sleazy boyfriend, Ewan Macgregor as Barb’s dandyish ex-husband. There is a lot of commitment to the roles — assumed accents, pronounced physical ticks — but this exuberant over-acting turns the characters into caricatures, especially as the film continues and the story become stranger and sadder.
What works best are the smaller moments: sweet conversations between estranged sisters, or the simple intimacies of two star-crossed lovers. In adapting an epic play into a two-hour movie, Letts tries to condense rather than cut, which throws off the film’s pacing. The plot is overstuffed and most of the meaning is swept away in the theatrics of the acting.
Julianne Nicholson (“Masters of Sex”) is shyly resilient as Ivy, the only sister who stayed behind to take care of their unrelenting mother. She poignantly performs the everyday duties while everyone else is too busy arguing to remember; there is a powerful scene in which she is alone in the kitchen, washing dishes, while her family gossips about her on the porch. It’s a shame that as the story goes on, her character is sacrificed to the craziness, as Ivy was the only real person grounding the brazen story.
More than anything else, the film succeeds in establishing exactly what Osage County is. It is only through the ugly desolation of the Great Plains that we can begin to understand why this family is so warped, and director John Wells (“The Company Men”) flawlessly cuts between family fights and empty sun-tinged fields.
And the house. Much like in an old-fashioned English novel, the house is everything: a once stately home reduced to dilapidation. It’s where the family reunites, but is haunted by a dense past. Violet ensconces herself in the home for years, and the way it is designed ensures that you can nearly smell the musty loneliness. In a sense, the film acts like a play, placing extreme value in the setting. The house also serves to isolate this family even more than they already have been, creating a microenvironment separate from much of the rest of the world.
What it may lack in organization, “August: Osage County” makes up for in pure earnestness. The cast is intensely committed, the screenplay lovingly adapted — the film is a mess not because they didn’t try, but because they tried too hard. Much like the Weston family, “August” focuses so much on painful introspection that it forgets how to live. It forgets how to be normal.