August: Osage County

Tracy Letts' Pulitzer prize-winning play, "August, Osage County," is occasionally funny and undeniably impressive in the torrents of verbal abuse that the characters unleash on one another. But the experience has an ugly undercurrent: people hurl vituperation and calumny; the victim passively endures the insult -- an aspect of both the theater piece and its film adaptation that doesn't exactly ring true. Finally, someone snaps and there are fisticuffs and the character with the vicious tongue gets her comeuppance. The audience's reaction is similar to the pleasure that we feel when a villain is slaughtered in an action film: we get a burst of adrenalin and feel complacent indignation mingled with pleasure. The effect is powerful and, even, in an unfortunate way, pleasureable but you walk out of the picture feeling just a wee bit dirty. The central scene in "August: Osage County" employs this dynamic: it is a long bravura ensemble scene, something like Chekhov on amphetamines. Meryl Streep, playing the drug-addicted and vicious matriarch of a family with three daughters (Julia Roberts, Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis), torments everyone at the dinner table. She excuses her cruel comments as "truth-telling" but she is really just taunting everyone within ear-shot. Finally, Julia Roberts has had enough and grapples with her mother, knocking her to the floor, and yanking her pills away from her. The audience gets the kind of charge out of this violent release of action that you might feel when a nasty professional wrestler gets beaned with a folding chair by a good guy. It's theatrical all right, but a fairly low species of theater. Later in the film, which goes on and on, a virtuous Indian maiden takes a shovel to Dermot Mulrooney and knocks him senseless -- the audience gets the same charge out of this assault and, in fact, wishes that the war-like Cheyenne girl would take the shovel to the rest of the cast and put paid to their endless carping and whining. Kin to Edward Albee's "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf," the play features all sorts of deep dark secrets including incest and every big scene involves several speeches involving embarrassing self-revelations, accusations, and Gothic accounts of assault and battery. It's no surprise that the ever-annoying Sam Shepherd, an actor who increasingly resembles in tone and diction (if not appearance) Walter Brennan has committed suicide to escape from this clan. In a fundamental way, the play (and the film) seems false. We have no idea why these characters are so bitter and cruel. Alcoholism and drug abuse don't seem sufficient causes for the torrets of vitriol that the characters unleash on one another. And the film's labored and realistic-seeming mise-en-scene doesn't really comport with the play's rather heightened speech and stylized action. Is there really a huge house baking on the west Oklahoma plains without air conditioning? And, if so, why don't the actors and actresses shed some of their outer clothing in light of the heat? (Letts seems to grasp this incongruity and provides a lame explanation of sorts: Meryl Streep makes the men put on their suit-jackets in the big luncheon scene shouting: "This is a funeral dinner, not a cock-fight.") When Streep's character plays an Eric Clapton song "Lay down Sally" near the end of the movie, we see her carefully put the needle in the groove of the record so as to start the tune at its exact beginning -- but wouldn't her hand tremble? Would she really be able to start the song at its precise beginning so accurately in a single, rather casual gesture? And the song is not the last tune on the LP. So wouldn't the record keep playing during the completely predictable scene (the audience expects this from the first five minutes of the movie) in which the abandoned matriarch is comforted by the valiant earth-mother Cheyenne maid -- an example, if ever there was one, of inverse racism in a film. Julia Roberts, who looks fantastically fierce and ugly in this film, flees her mother's home in a pick-up -- but whose pick-up? A big point is made of the fact that Roberts has arrived with her husband and daughter in the same car. Is she stealing the pick-up? And the final shot in the film, suggesting that Roberts is planning to drive 625 miles to Denver is unwittingly risible -- she's dressed in rather shabby pajamas and has left all her luggage, and, presumably, her purse, her wallet, and her money back at the ranch that she has just fled. These are minor points but the film is designed in such a way as to cause you to be troubled by mistakes of this sort. The direction by John Wells is only barely functional -- it's just shot and reverse-shot with many huge close-ups emphasizing Ms. Streep's waxy pallor and wild eyes. This is the kind of hammy role for which actresses are awarded with Oscars -- Streep looks like a zombie and her lips and eyebrows writhe with effort as she pronounces her baroque lines. And Julia Roberts vies with her for hideousness -- never a conventionally attractive actress, she is picturesquely awfu-looking in this movie: her profile resembles an angry bull-frog and her huge swollen lips seem the result of cosmetic surgery gone awry. All the acting is excellent in a showy kid of way. Poor Benedict Cumberbatch is completely wasted in the role of a sweet nitwit in love with his own sister -- the poor guy has a fine imitation American accent with, even, a trace of a south-western twang and his eyes fill up with tears when violent tongues begin to flay him.