"August: Osage County" at Durham Library Thursday

Movie Notes by Don Bourret

August: Osage County could be considered a tiptop feel-good movie. After spending a couple of hours with the Weston Family you have to feel really good that your family, no matter how dysfunctional, is not even in the same league as this crew.

The events take place over a few sultry days in Oklahoma when the Weston extended family – mother, daughters, cousins, in-laws - gathers for the funeral of the family’s patriarch. What follows are a number of unpleasant, even shocking revelations fueled primarily by the mother’s “truth telling,” which does no one any good. The plot points are too numerous and complicated to list here, but just when you think you have heard the worst, something comes along to beat it. The film’s centerpiece is a family dinner that should make your most miserably remembered family dinner seem like the Teddy Bear Picnic. The film has been described as “darkly comedic,” and there are a few funny scenes; but dark trumps comedic in this murky tale.

The film’s major attribute is its outstanding ensemble cast, an actors’ showcase, headed by Meryl Streep as the mother, Violet, a mean and caustic woman suffering from mouth cancer and addicted to pain killers. Julia Roberts is Barbara, her long-suffering and bitter oldest daughter, on the verge of a divorce and unable to break the ties to her spiteful mother. Others in the cast include Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Benedict Cumberbatch, Margo Martinale, Juliette Lewis, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Lewis and Sam Shepard; and just catching all these seasoned pros at the top of their game makes this film worth watching.

Tracy Letts wrote the screenplay, adapting it from his Pulitizer- and Tony-winning play. The big problem with the film, I think, is that his award-winning play was 3 ½ hours long, and his film is only two hours. Granted, two hours with this pack will seem like more than enough and can leave you plenty depressed; but I also felt often that I was missing something, that there were key elements in the backstories of various lesser characters that might have helped to clarify events on the screen. Maybe not, but losing more than a third of the story has to shortchange one or more sad tale. Still the film retains enough biting wit and hurtful exchanges to satisfy all but the most sadistic.

Tracy Letts has said he was amazed at how many people over the years have told him he must have been eavesdropping on their family gatherings, that what he wrote captured some, even many of their relatives to perfection. I spotted some of mine in there. Now it’s your turn