OVP: August: Osage County (2013)

Film: August: Osage County (2013)
Stars: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Juliette Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Misty Upham
Director: John Wells
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Meryl Streep, Supporting Actress-Julia Roberts)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

I came to the New York theater scene a bit late in my life, so I was never able to see Tracy Letts' brilliant stage play in its grand Broadway glory.  Yet, like most great plays that make the transfer to the screen, you can feel its humble beginnings.  People frequently talk about how the book was better than the movie, and while I don't always agree with this (we're talking about two vastly different mediums), it's almost always true that the play is better than the movie.  This isn't a slam on movies (I heart movies, perhaps at the end of the day more than live theater), but because plays are almost always written with a finite space in mind.  You can see that in movies like Doubt, where the constancy of a moving, in-plain-view set will better feature the acting being done.  You introduce subtlety, multiple locations, and the ups-and-downs of moviemaking into the conversation, and you have a very different beast, something few directors (save the greats like Elia Kazan) can properly transfer to the big screen.

(Spoilers Ahead) In a way, the theatrical beginnings of this play are both its blessing and its curse.  The film, the story of three daughters returning home to their alcoholic mother and their dead father, is tailor-made for the stage.  It’s filled with large intense character swings and a bevy of great parts.  I can imagine one of the best jobs of the past two years was Kerry Barden and Paul Schnee’s, picking different actors to fill up these larger-than-life roles.

The direction of the movie is, in a similar fashion to Doubt a few years ago, almost an entire failure.  The movie has nothing interesting to say from the director’s chair and John Wells doesn’t seem to have a direction aside from letting the script and the acting do the work for him.  This almost works, and it’s a better film than Doubt was five years ago.  The actors are all over-the-map in terms of quality, but the ones who are selling the script sell it wholeheartedly.

Chief amongst them is Meryl Streep as Violet Weston, the drug-addled matriarch of the family.  I know it’s cliché to call Streep a revelation or the best-in-show, but I haven’t honestly been able to do it for a few years-she hasn’t been this good since Prada in 2006, in my opinion, and only because I found this to be a particularly superb year for Best Actress did I leave her in sixth place on my own ballot.  That being said, there’s such a sense of understanding in her role-you can always tell when Streep isn’t just showing off her impressive vocal skill and has given genuine thought into the background of her character.  You can feel the way that she says things that Violet has rehearsed, whether for shock value or a calculating cut to gage the room.  You love the way that she knows she could be more sympathetic, but only mines that well when nothing else is an option.  And you feel the way that she has judged and ranked and rated her daughters for so many years that nothing they do will ever change her opinion.

Aside from Streep, the other most impressive turn in the film is Margo Martindale.  Martindale has been on-fire lately, with her recent Emmy win and a hit television show on CBS (gotta love late-in-life success), and she nails almost all of her key scenes.  Mattie Fae is a dynamic character, filled with bitterness toward her son due to (I’m not kidding about that spoiler alert) her having him with her brother-in-law (Violet’s dead husband) and his constant struggle to succeed.  She also is aware that he is having an affair with his half-sister (thinking that she’s his first cousin) and insists that her niece Barbara (Roberts) stop it.  The final showdown between Roberts, Streep, and Julianne Nicholson as the incestuous female half of that relationship is a doozy, and you get to see some really great acting from all involved, but if I had to go with a specific scene that I loved the most in the movie, it belongs to Martindale, staring straight ahead with determination in her eyes as she tells Barbara that this relationship must end.

And yet, Margo Martindale is not the best supporting actress nominee from this film, even though common sense says that if the movie was getting one, it would be her.  Julia Roberts, as the lead protagonist gets the nomination instead.  Roberts is fine, but she’s A) not remotely as good as either Streep or Martindale and B) she’s the main character!!!  This is the worst example I’ve seen of category fraud since Casey Affleck (when he played a title character, for God's sake), and I cannot tell if the campaign is souring me more than it should toward Roberts , but I must admit it isn’t helping.  Some of the other actors in the film, as well, don’t succeed half as well as Barbara (Juliette Lewis is a fine actor but this character is completely unnecessary, as is Abigail Breslin’s moody daughter, Dermot Mulroney’s perverted playboy, and Misty Upham’s silent maid), but Roberts role could clearly have succeeded so much better in the hands of a more theatrically-trained actress (Laura Linney, anyone?) and she just felt out of her element against such strong women.

Finally, I cannot write this review without telling you that plot and acting alone should have gotten it four stars, but I couldn’t bring myself to go there after the ending.  Why, oh why did they cut to Barbara randomly in a field like a freaking Lifetime movie?!?  The ending was perfect, right there with the shot of that screen door flapping in the hot Oklahoma sun.  There was no need for a sense of light at the end of the tunnel-it’s an extremely bitter movie.  These are not good people, and they are a family who poison each other through words and actions.  It’s fine to end on a sad note, because there is little promise that their lives will ever be happy ones.  I felt like there was a sense of redemption at the end of the movie, and after two hours of evidence to the contrary, I felt cheated by the Hallmark finale.

Those are my thoughts on this Oscar-nominated film-what are yours?  Who was your best in show?  Will either actress win the Oscar?  And can anyone justify Julia Roberts being in the supporting category aside from her agent?  Share in the comments!