JULIANNE NICHOLSON, MERYL STREEP, AND JULIA ROBERTS IN AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTRY

Family troubles

This star-studded two-hour screen adaptation of a three-hour play has come in for harsh criticism. I liked it very much and welcomed the shorter confinement required this time to experience playwright Tracy Letts' vision of the multiple dysfunctionalities of a complex family. August: Osage County begins with an old man, Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), a poet, soliloquiziing and quoting T.S. Eliot ("Life is very long") in a big house. He sums up his marriage succinctly: "My wife takes pills, and I drink." After this opening interlude, Beverly disappears, turns up in a motel, and then is found dead in a lake, an apparent suicide. The bulk of the action, which follows, covers the funeral and the hours thereafter wherein family histories are reviewed and reenacted in the classical manner of American plays, updated with drugs, foul language, viscious name-calling and brutal truths Jerry Springer might envy. All has been tirelessly and fluently reimagined by the talented Letts himself, who wrote the condensed screenplay. Wells' work on ER and The West Wing developed a skill at managing fluid movement, notably in choreographing Aaron Sorkin's fast-paced dialogue as staffers sparred verbally while pacing through White House corridors. August: Osage County's speeches and scenes slide into one another. You can get lost in them. You revel in the theatricality of the name calling, foul language, the recriminations, and the awful revelations toward the end. The reduction in time and the vivid, tightly-shot scenes add a welcome pungency and speed. I don't see what's wrong, but we'll look into the criticisms later.

Presiding over events is cancer-ridden, pill-popping, dominant matriarch, now widow, Violet Weston (Meryl Streep, in a virtuoso performance), while all the family converges. There's Mattie Fae Aiken (Margo Martindale), Violet's ample sister, and her husband Charlie Aiken (Chris Cooper). There's Barbara (an excellent, intense but dry Julia Roberts), the eldest daughter, with her estranged husband Bill (Ewan McGregor), who has their moody teen daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin) in tow. There's Karen (Juliette Lewis), the youngest, who shows up on the arm of her "fiance" Steve Huberbrecht (Dermot Mulroney), a suave Florida crook with dubious business connections and a supply of killer weed he offers to turn on Jean with. The middle daughter is Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), a colorless, insecure woman who is hiding the fact that she is now involved with her first cousin, the somehow weird and failed "Little Charles" (Benedict Cumberbatch, an actor ideal for slightly strange roles, sad and touching here). Letts specializes in trailer trash extremes and so Ivy's and Little Charles' secret turns out to be a good deal weirder than they realize.

Violet, the family's drugged-out yet indefatigable queen bee, insists the men keep their jackets on at the dinner table when they return from the funeral, despite the sweltering heat. There is a battle for control of which that is only one opening hint. Violet smokes, pops tons of pills, mostly downers, and has been undergoing chemo for (logically, given her verbal venom) mouth cancer, leaving her with a thin patchy layer of gray hair she covers with an ugly dark brown wig. Violet is impaired, but she is never not in charge. Nothing eludes her gaze. This multiple-character drama, both play and film, is nonetheless primarily a set piece for the actress who plays Violet. Streep plays it to the hilt, but she is a film actress and she does not declaim. Her chief opponent is Barbara, Julia Roberts, the actress herself now aging and hardening from her earlier charmer days and ripe for a really rich dramatic role like this -- the part of a woman finding herself isolated, left alone, fearful of becoming her mother, and perhaps thrown together with her, with no one else there but the Native American housekeeper Johnna (Misty Upham).

Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulroey, and Benedict Cumberbatch are great casting. Each is quite different in style and look, yet you will note that they're all actors who make excellent nonentities. And when you size the women up, Mattie Fae may have some clout, but otherwise there's really, for all these people, just Violent and Barbara. And yet so good are the writing, directing and acting, everybody comes alternately and flowingly to life.

Tracy Letts is a master of extremes, as his small, brilliant debut, the play Bug, fully displayed. An explosive little powerhouse of an Off-Broadway triumph (Barrow Street Theatre 2004; but it premiered in London in 1996), Bug was transferred to the screen (by William Friedkin) with less than complete success. Bug seems a play that works very much with the specific magic of stage and live audience. Though critics of August: Osage County have claimed it's just breaking plates, and "a mess," August: Osage County's range of character and store of dialogue offer a flexibility Bug lacks. It's much less scale- and setting-specific. Bug relied on intense claustrophobia, best conveyed in the setting of a small stage in a small theatre. But Osage County concerns a big-mouthed matriarch of a big family in a big house, and the "opening up" filming offers works naturally for it, with no loss of concentration.

One reviewer, Laremy Legel of Film.com, notes that scenes are good and performances (especially Streep's and Roberts') are great, but their "amazing work" is like "building a lovely home on a foundation of quicksand." But if you read this review, you find Legel's problem is with the characters and the original play and not specifically with this film or anything intrinsic to art. In fact the reviewer thinks Tracy Letts is a woman. What it boils down to is that Tracy Letts -- even though August: Osage County is his most mainstream play and a Pulitzer Prize winner -- is not for everyone. The fact remains that Tracy Letts is primarily a playwright, though a good enough one for it to be worthwhile to film his plays. They reliably provide great material for actors, and fun for the viewer. This one, here produced by George Clooney and distributed by the Weinstein brothers, is more cinematic than Friedkin's (2006) Bug or his 2011 grindhouse Killer Joe.

August: Osage Country , 121 mins., debuted at Toronto, and showed at nearly a dozen US festivals. It opened in cinemas in NYC and LA 27 December 2013 and was screened in commercial release at Regal Union Square, NYC.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.