August: Osage County

Release Date: December 27th, 2013
Running Time: 120 minutes
Directed by: John Wells
Written by: Tracy Letts (adapted from his 2007 play of the same name)
Starring: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Juliette Lewis, Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dermot Mulroney, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Misty Upham

Meryl Streep is highly regarded as the best film actress of her generation (and indeed one of the best of all time), and I, like many, have been impressed by her performances countless times. Here she plays Violet Weston, the fiery-tongued, cancer-ridden, pill-addicted, contentious, and downright miserable matriarch of a rural Oklahoma family. It's a tough role, no question—how to portray a woman so brash and cruel without playing it over the top? I don't know. And apparently neither does Meryl, who uncharacteristically treads into overacting territory here.

The story involves the disappearance of the Weston patriarch, Beverly (Sam Shepard), from the family's country home. An ensemble of characters are called in to support the seriously ill Violet—she has mouth cancer and still smokes vehemently. Among the supporting roles are Violet's three daughters: Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, has inherited her mother's toughness, outspokenness, and anger. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) is the middle child, the one who never got married or moved out of the town. And Juliette Lewis plays Karen, the youngest, in a role that we've seen her do all too often—a Southern, ditzy, redneck sexpot. She shows up with her fiancé, a sleazy businessman (Dermot Mulroney), while Roberts' character brings along her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and teenaged daughter (Abigail Breslin). Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) also arrives on the scene, with husband Charles (Chris Cooper) and son Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch). And the last character to round out the cast is Johnna (Misty Upham), the "Indian" housekeeper that Beverly Weston hired to help with his wife, shortly before his disappearance. She only has one or two lines in the whole movie, but is present throughout.

During the course of the story, family secrets unfold; tensions that are immediately present increase, and we get glimpses into the reasons why these tensions exist—moments of insight into why Violet is so miserable and cruel to all those around her. She grew up dirt poor, experienced abuse when she was young, and so on and so forth. All the supporting players are fine—Chris Cooper in particular shines, and Roberts has her moments. But it's all so grim. To call the family dysfunctional is obvious. There's perhaps a subtle hint that the excessive, super-serious drama is intentional as an attempt at black comedy or something approaching satire, but this angle isn't emphasized. I like heavy, edgy dramas, no doubt—stories that aren't afraid to look at the dark side of human behaviour. But there's not much here that I feel like I haven't seen before; it left with me little to think about. The film spoon-feeds the audience with its insistent Southern hillbilly melodrama, all revolving around Streep's character. Because so much hinges on her, it's hard to not focus on her performance; it's overplayed, and as a result is underwhelming.  

At times in her career Meryl Streep has been described as the female equivalent to Robert De Niro (although it might be said that he's the male equivalent to her) with her chameleonlike ability to embody a character so completely that the audience forgets they're watching the world famous actress and instead just sees the character. Silkwood (1983) comes to mind as one of her best performances in this respect. With already two Academy Awards under her belt at the time, she was still able to so subtly and seamlessly convince us that she was the blue-collar union activist Karen Silkwood, and not the multiple Oscar-winning dramatic actress Meryl Streep. She looked different in that film, and I don't just mean that she died her hair or wore clothes that suited the character. I mean that somehow, through her mild accent, the way she spoke, her mannerisms, and body language, she transformed herself into a different person. This is the magic that actors of her caliber display when at their finest, that she herself has displayed so many times throughout her career. Yet in August: Osage County, I never once stopped seeing her as Meryl Streep, the three-time Oscar winner and most nominated actor of all time, the grand dame of American Cinema, the legend.

It's an unfortunate thing that seems to happen to the best of actors; by late in their careers they have played so many different challenging roles to perfection, received so many accolades, and become so famous that they become caricatures of their media personas and stereotypical roles. It happened to Al Pacino when some time around Scent of a Woman (1992) he became the "Hoo-wah!" guy. It happened to Jack Nicholson when he became forever regarded as the sly, nasally-voiced rebel following too many One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest-type roles. And it happened to De Niro, largely regarded as playing the mafia gangster and/or crazy, twisted guy who speaks in one liners (à la "You talkin' to me?" from Taxi Driver), even though those kind of roles only make up a small percentage of his body of work. De Niro is still able to capture that chameleonlike, becoming-the-character quality in the occasional role lately (notably in 2014's The Bag Man—while not a great movie overall, his performance was mind-blowing) that he used to capture in every role in the first half of his career. But when you've achieved the highest level of artistry, fulfilled the highest peak of your creative ambition, and done so numerous times, as Streep has—where do you go from there? More of the same, I guess—keep going for those challenging roles. Or maybe don't, like De Niro, who after the age of 55 or so turned to doing mostly comedies and generally lighter films. Not that comedic roles aren't challenging, but he changed/expanded his cinematic breadth. Streep is also a great comedic actress, but in this movie she goes for the dramatic gusto, and I just can't shake the feeling that she overdoes it.

Don't get me wrong, it's a decent performance by the measure of most and I might be impressed if it were a less accomplished actress than her. But we've come to expect so much from her, because she's given so much, so often. But giving so much in her past films has meant naturalistically transforming herself into the character, while here she pushes too hard, as if she's...dare I say...trying to win another Oscar. She got the nomination, but didn't win. Julia Roberts was also nominated for her role as Violet's daughter. She mostly does a pretty good job, if occasionally also veering into heavy-handed, overacting territory—although not as much as Streep who feels like she's trying to steal every scene she's in, and as a result the whole film suffers.

Perhaps if I was from the culture that the film depicts then I would be able to relate more. I've had my share of what might be called dysfunctional family experiences, just not in an American rural South context. But when a story is told well then some degree of thematic human universality emerges, making it appealing to those even outside of the culture that's being portrayed. While specific elements and details may be different from the viewer's personal story, a well-told narrative should nonetheless communicate some common experience. But with this movie I mostly just experienced dismal relationships between people in great pain. With little to no attempt at redemption of any kind, it mostly just left me in pain.
Rating (out of 5): ★★½
• Nik Dobrinsky / Boy Drinks Ink
August 8th, 2016