Performances aside, August: Osage County mostly directs itself. In adapting his own Pulitzer-Prize winning play, Tracy Letts has made a compressed-but-extremely faithful rendition, and his words — along with unrestrained performances from the likes of Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts among others — are what lend this film its power. John Wells, who made his directorial debut with 2010’s The Company Men after decades of work in television, is largely voiceless, allowing the film to play out in conventional editing patterns and infrequent, dialogue-driven exterior shots that attempt to break the film out of its theatrical foundations. In short, this is August: Osage County for those who don’t have a chance to see it on the stage.
The film, which clocks in around two hours, makes a necessary trimming of the 200-minute-plus stage production, yet without excising characters. After the death and disappearance of Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), his cancer-ridden and pill-popping wife, Violet (Streep), manages to get her three daughters — Barbara (Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen (Juliette Lewis) — together for both a family reunion and, it will quickly become apparent, a funeral. After said funeral, things quickly unravel. These people can’t make alliances with one another because of obvious fears of betrayal, and most probably couldn’t go around the crowded room for the purpose of saying “I love you” to each person. Put them all in a house together — that’s the aforementioned Violet and her three daughters, along with Barbara’s husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), their daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin), Karen’s fiancé, Steve (Dermot Mulroney), as well as Violet’s sister, Mattie (Margo Martindale), her husband, Charles (Chris Cooper) and their son, “Little” Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch) — for one week, and you get a claustrophobic, stuffy domestic tragedy.
Get all that? Don’t worry: among the film’s biggest virtues is an effective detailing of the family tree. Characters regularly confront one another in group settings, forcing them to call each other by name, and most are, too, seeing changes to their marital status — separating, engaged, widowed, and more — so these relationships are also repeatedly sketched out in a verbal manner. Considering the film is less than 60% the play’s length, it’s almost baffling how easy a game of Who’s Who would be.
But insofar as making August: Osage County feel like cinema instead of theater, Wells’ efforts are limited. While the beautiful sets and cinematography, which convincingly evokes the sweltering heat, lead us along, Wells doesn’t bring anything new out of the source, and, when the action moves outside the house, location comes to feel more incidental than important. This isn’t quite an example of filmed theater, but there’s no mistaking that this material was meant for the stage, not a screen.
Osage County, as in its original incarnation, is anchored by a rousing dinner scene in which the drug-addled matriarch tears into each and every member of her family the evening of her husband’s funeral, encountering resistance from Barbara each step of the way until the subtle drama morphs into a sort of black comedy mixed with melodrama — a pitch it maintains until the film’s completion. Throughout the first act, tensions swell just below a boiling point (heavy-handedly paralleled to the August and Oklahoma heat, via a shot of a digital thermometer reading 108 degrees) as we get to know everyone. When the dinner arrives, nonstop hysterics paradoxically let problems boil over slowly, not all at once — and, as such, Osage County‘s second half is one character tragedy after another. But the scale of the film, combined with its shortened runtime, prevents attempts to milk them for tears. Wells keeps action moving from relationship to relationship without ever trying to devastate us.
Unfortunately, that lack of a proper runtime makes many of them resonate as a bit slight; supporting characters lack the vividness that the elongated stage production granted, and Wells & Letts offer little or nothing new on the screen to make them more vibrant. As such, August: Osage County, here, is an elongated domestic dispute between Violet and Barbara that sidetracks into other characters for the sake of stakes; above all else, they emanate a false sensation of themes operating on a higher level, if not one that’s any more profound. Tears are often prioritized over tightness and focus.
That said, watching Barbara and her sisters try to reconcile despite prejudices and secrets is — thanks again to the slate of performances — closer to tragedy than soap opera. It helps that Letts’ screenplay allows information to trickle out naturally: secrets come out when a conversation between two characters demands it — sometimes at moments of convenience, and, only on one or two occasions, at a forced instance. Furthermore, the tug-of-war between Barbara and Violet, almost always played for hysterics, is captivating and powerful. Bad decisions accumulate until apologies are replaced by things that can never be taken back, and the film is at its best during these scenes.
Nevertheless, Wells offers little reason to see his film instead of attending a stage production or simply reading the play; to that end, August: Osage County, while relatively effective on its own, seems destined to be another film that high school teachers use to “reward” their students for successfully completing an assignment. The A-list cast makes it a good watch, and the impressive production design makes for a suitable-enough stage replacement, but, in the end, it’s just that: a suitable example, and nothing more.
August: Osage County opens on Friday, December 27th.