August: Osage County

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.