August: Osage County (2013)

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY  (2013)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Wells
    Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper,
    Julianne Nicholson, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis,
    Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney,
    Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham
Portrait of a family coming together and falling apart. Meryl Streep plays Violet Weston, the matriarch, a needy, vicious old woman with a mouth full of cancer and unfiltered profanity. The reason for the get-together is the funeral of Vi's husband Beverly (Sam Shepard), an alcoholic poet who has committed suicide, probably in self-defense. The extended family includes Vi's three daughters, their past, present and would-be partners, her sister and brother-in-law, a nephew and a granddaughter. If sharing an enclosed space with Vi isn't enough to set everybody on edge, it's August and it's hotter than hell in rural Oklahoma. This was based on a play, and a lot of it plays like something crafted for delivery from the stage to the back seats. The actors kind of go with that, most of them, and it works because they're good enough to pull it off. It's like "Nebraska" minus the understatement, another movie about the relationships between adult children and aging parents. But Bruce Dern's character in "Nebraska", beneath all his crotchetyness, was at least recognizably human, a guy who by nature asked nothing from nobody and expected little in return. Streep's character here is the opposite of that. She's a truly horrible person, hiding her vulnerability behind a curtain of bile and cigarette smoke. Nobody escapes her abuse, and her capacity for cruelty is limitless. By the end, the others have all pretty much had it, and one by one they come to the same conclusion: It's better to be without a family than to be part of a family like this.