August: Osage County Reviews

“Grazie a Dio non prevediamo il futuro altrimenti non ci alzeremmo dal letto!”
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I have to say I honestly didn't know anything about this movie before seeing it out on DVD. It has an amazing cast and the premise seems interesting. I always like a good dysfunctional family movie so I decided to check it out. The acting is quite amazing and it's interesting to see Ewan McGregor and Benedict Cumberbatch show how well they can portray American characters. There are some great moments of dialogue that were executed in great ways. I loved seeing Julia Roberts play against type for once. There are some truly emotional and powerful scenes throughout that make you think about life and family. There are some pretty interesting twists and turns for this drama that I didn't see coming. I liked this, but I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. It's definitely very interesting and well made though.

I saw the play some years ago in spanish in Lima, and I find intact the universe, the dramatic structure, the distribution of crisis and tense speeches. Wells is very loyal to Letts ant Letts to his play. The Oklahoma plains are the bonus.

Well, what made this movie a very special? Of course the stars. Yeah, this movie was overwhelmed with a pack great actors and actresses. It was based on a play and very beautifully cinematised. Usually scripts for plays are designed to take place in a limited location so that is why it was not stretched by map. The movie was shot at a couple of locations and the majority of them are in a country house, in that most part comes while dining. So that is where it kinda reminded me 'When do we eat?'.

I love dramas specially which deals about a family issues like honest father, jobless son, lonely daughter, ill mother, drug addict grands children, rich laws, faithful maid et cetera. In some scenarios, it will reverse and becomes a great comedy like the one we had seen in Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler movies. Stories like this are very near to our lives, well, at least for somebody in some way. The much reality it goes, much impresses me. This is the one of a beautiful family drama of the year.

The movie characters were portrayed in an elegant manner. The connections between each others and problems to be solved were placed in the perfect positions. In many parts you can see the extended scenes, it is because to give a feel of a cinema. Some of the quotes relating life and relationship were inspiring.

In this movie, the three time Oscar winner Meryl Streep got an another nominee tag for her beautiful performance. Julia Robert as well was nominated for best supporting actress but lost to '12 Years a Slave'. Not only these two, others too filled the movie with their powerful performances, including the rising star Abigail Breslin.

Editing, especially when it is your Tony and Pulitzer prize winner baby, is a tricky beast to tame in adapting a work from one medium to the next. What do you edit, where and why? These are the questions that all writers must answer when performing the adaptation process. I can only imagine the difficulty that Tracy Letts encountered when he had to perform this alchemic work on his beloved stage play.

Sadly, those questions don’t seem to have been answered in August: Osage County. Some of the magic appears to have gotten lost in the transition from the Broadway stage to the big screen. Maybe it had something to do with sanding down the three-and-half hour running time from the stage into a more manageable two hours. There’s abrupt character transition, new information is just thrown into your lap, and despite primarily taking place in the same house numerous characters have a strange habit of disappearing for long stretches of time.

What I walked away from August: Osage County with was this thought: “Man, I really wish I had seen the play instead.” It’s not that the movie is bad, it’s just that’s inelegantly constructed. You walk away with the feeling that this must really work wonders onstage, where the actors are in front of you and you’re trapped inside the tense and hostile atmosphere. A good film adaptation can do this, Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made George and Martha’s house feel like a gateway to Hell, the exorcism was a cathartic moment in which the sunlight look brand new.

But Virginia Woolf had Nichols, and August has John Wells, primarily a television director of much repute and recognition. But directly television and directing a film are two entirely different beasts. Wells seems to favor a point-and-shoot aesthetic, afraid to meet the darkness of the material, the vitriol of the dialog head-on and wrestle with it in an engaging way. He softens major scenes, doesn’t find the appropriate amount of dark comedy in others, but his actors are game.

With the exception of Ewan McGregor, his accent wanders all over the place and he’s stuck with a half-formed character and the lion’s share of awkwardly handled material, the acting ensemble of August: Osage County is a high-water mark for great acting. This is very much an actor’s piece, complete with loud pronouncements and chances to chew the scenery (which is frequently indulged, but it works for these characters). Sam Shepard is world-weary and soulful as the family patriarch, while Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis are aces as the level-headed middle daughter and aggressively-perky and happy-go-lucky youngest daughter. Dermont Mulroney is creepy and slick as Lewis’ oily fiancé, while Abigail Breslin is the disillusioned and snarky daughter of Julia Roberts and McGregor. Chris Cooper, Margo Martindale and Benedict Cumberbatch feel like a real Oklahoma family being plucked off the street and thrown in front of a movie camera. Cooper and Martindale threaten to frequently steal the film from the leads as they bicker, make-up and argue over their no-good son (Cumberbatch). While Misty Upham’s role seems to have become a victim of editing, she gives her housekeeper a sweetness and quiet-center that counter-balances some of the insanity surrounding her.

But, much like the stage play, August: Osage County belongs to two women – Julie Roberts as the eldest daughter and Meryl Streep as their acid-tongued, drug addicted mother. While I found Streep to sometimes be too obviously acting in a few scenes, effectively nudging us and going “Watch me act the hell out of this,” I found myself believing in her character more often than consciously noticing her acting. But Roberts was the real surprise here. I am prone to finding her a great movie star, but one who recycles the same moves in every dramatic performance. She surprised me here. Not only did she rise to the challenge of the material, I found her overall impression to better than that of Streep’s. She find the dark comic tone in lines like “Eat the fish, bitch” and finds the horror in her character’s realization that she is her mother’s daughter in far too many ways.

I think if you approach August as a showcase for a group of talented actors to chew on some great material, then there’s a lot to enjoy in here. But I was expecting something much tougher, something that hit much harder. This is a film that needed the freewheeling madness, the hothouse paranoia of a Virginia Woolf or A Streetcar Named Desire to soar. As it lands, it’s good, but never truly great as a complete film. But there’s magic to be found in the individual components.

The acting in this one is superb, and there are some really powerful lines but as a whole the plot just seems pointless. It's a quite depressing movie. It's people hurting eachother over and over again. It pictures broken relationships but without the hope that they will ever be fixed, as it is clear that each character will persist in their selfishness. No one even dreams of changing and therefore things will stay the same between them. Don;t watch this unless you're in a really good mood and quite sure that nothing will get you off your pink cloud.