John Wells 2013 USA
Starring: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Sam Shepard, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney
Tracy Letts has had a pretty good record in recent years, his plays Bug and Killer Joe having been adapted into a pair of decent films by William Friedkin. Now his toxic-tongued August: Osage County has followed suit, although this time with a different director, a far more star-studded cast and far more theatricality than either of the former. The reception has not been a warm one, with many admitting to being unsure whether to categorise it as a comedy or a drama. To me it sits somewhere in the middle, its fast-talking, undoubtedly brutal take on family dysfunction turned ever so slightly mouldy by a script that piles trauma upon trauma until the whole thing descends into a unrealistic black farce. It's one that may have worked as a TV series, the timescale of the action stretched out to take place over several weeks, but as a story set over the space of about 10 days it all just seems too much. It's a shame because it's beautifully acted, in one case from an utterly surprising person. I don't think it will come as much of a revelation when I say that I've never had much time for Julia Roberts, her career long having represented a huge, patronising smile and not much else to me, but in a huge shock she actually gives the best performance of the film, even outshining the virtually unassailable Streep (who's excellent as well). In one particular scene, a violent confrontation with Streep's stricken, roaring gorgon of a matriarch, veins bulge visibly from her forehead and her countenance momentarily resembles a creature from an H. R. Giger painting. Had she been less experienced it would be what's known as a 'coming out performance', as it is it's the best of her career, albeit one tinged with a small amount of melancholy. You sort of have to wonder, if she's been capable of this all along, why she's spent the last 25 years making paper-thin arse gravy like Runaway Bride? She can't need the money that badly.
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