August: Osage County presents a painful, bitter, sad look at family dysfunction without much hope or goodness involved. It is a harsh look at a family struggling through addiction, death, manipulation, divorce, infidelity, suicide, and mental illness. The raw nature of the emotional journey of the family picked with sharp nails at the scabs of any healed-over personally seen dysfunction to a degree that I felt exhausted and exposed when the credits finally rolled. Another friend said it was a feeling of relief that it was over. Indeed.
The family here suffers not only with the above issues, but also vile meanness. It was that meanness that hurt the most to see play out. As I watched, I ached for the hurt of the victims of the acrid comments. I, as I’m sure most others, have encountered mean people before. The difference is that when I’ve seen such meanness, I’ve been able to leave and to limit my interactions. I didn’t leave the film, so it wore on me heavily as I stayed and watched the meanness dig to levels lower than I could have anticipated.
Meryl Streep delivers a powerful performance as the addicted, bipolar, previously abused matriarch of this group of people called a family. (As wonderful as she was, I still choose Cate Blanchett for the Oscar this year.) Julia Roberts isn’t as good as I think she could have been; something was lacking, but I still rallied behind her struggles as daughter, wife, mother, sister, niece—-the one trying so hard to be everything to everyone.
I knew this was based on a stage play, and on screen, it felt that way (varying locations aside). I was not at all surprised, therefore, to see at the end that the playwright also wrote the screenplay. (But someone dropped the ball with wardrobe: when it’s 108 degrees in the afternoon, it doesn’t get cool enough even in the early morning to call for long sleeves. Come on, Hollywood. Do better research.)
I understand the critics’ less than stellar views of the movie: there’s very little “good” in the story. But I’m glad I saw it. Although its few funny moments brought on some chuckles, they didn’t live up to the trailer’s painting this as lighter than it really was. It’s heavy. But it was a good film—if you can get past the emotional beating that comes along with watching such an intimate intrusion into a family that fell apart at least a generation before it came into existence.