Nearly every year, The Weinstein Company will focus the bulk of their awards season efforts on one film, recently having great success with The King’s Speech, The Artist and last year’s Silver Linings Playbook. This year, their prized pig is most likely August: Osage County. While the adaptation of Tracy Letts‘ play doesn’t land until November, we’ve got our first trailer today for the film directed by John Wells.
Featuring a dysfunctional family coming together after a death, it looks like the kind of drama one might expect in a late-year contender and we’ll be keeping it on our radar. Check it out below (thanks to Good Morning America) for the film starring Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Abigail Breslin, Dermot Mulroney and Margo Martindale.
AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY is an upcoming comedy drama film based on Tracy Letts’ play of the same name. The film is directed by TV producer John Wells (ER, The West Wing), and produced by George Clooney, Jean Doumanian, Grant Heslov, Steve Traxler and Harvey Weinstein. Its ensemble cast is led by Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. The film tells the dark, hilarious and deeply touching story of the strong-willed women of the Weston family, whose lives have diverged until a family crisis brings them back to the Midwest house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional woman who raised them.
In Oklahoma, in August, Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), is a poet with a drinking problem while his wife, Violet (Streep) suffers from mouth cancer and has a newly developed addiction to drugs. Beverly decides to hire a live-in cook and caregiver for Violet. A few weeks after Johnna (Misty Upham) is hired, Beverly disappears which motivates the family to come together to look for him but only to find a few days later that he has committed suicide. Violet and Beverly’s daughters, Barbara (Roberts) and Karen (Juliette Lewis), along with Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) who lives in the house, come to their father’s funeral, as does the entire family. A series of conflicts ensue over the next several days as Violet and Barbara have never understood each other. Karen’s fiance proves to be a pot smoker and tries to molest his soon to be niece, Ivy is planning to run away with her cousin after engaging in a romantic relationship. At the end Violet remains alone, only with Johnna.
August: Osage County opens on November 8th.