August: Osage County (2014)

Adapting a stage play for the screen is a tricky business.
When the trailers for August: Osage County first began to circulate in mid-2013, it was widely assumed that the film would be a triumph. With Meryl Streep at the helm as the indomitable Violet Weston, a Southern matriarch with an appetite for home truths and Xanax, and a supporting cast composed of Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor and Juliette Lewis, it looked sure to be a critical and commercial hit. But along the way, something went wrong. Lukewarm reviews began to creep in, including a miserly two stars from the Guardian. Osage County was accused of being too obvious, too unimaginative, and, greatest of crimes, too theatrical.

I can only assume that those who disliked it were blinkered by notions of Tracy Letts's original version. Like, I imagine, most viewers, I have never seen the stage play and had no preconceptions about the film's source material. Even so, it is precisely the theatricality of the whole thing that proves such a joy. Set in the fiery heat of summer in the flat plains of Oklahoma, Osage County sizzles with repressed anger and seasonal discomfort. Every cast member is constantly tugging at their ties and fiddling with their shirts, desperately conscious of the rising tempers and temperatures in the Weston family home. In the tradition of great domestic dramas, director John Wells makes the confines of the house itself the film's visual focal point. There is no air in this locked and shuttered abode.

Family dynamics have the greatest explosive potential at events driven by rituals, namely weddings and funerals. In this case, the latter is the force bringing the scattered members of the Weston clan together. Violet's three daughters - iron-willed Barbara (Roberts), reticent Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), and hapless Karen (Lewis) - make the pilgrimage back to Osage County with their respective emotional baggage. Spouses, fiancés, and offspring make up the numbers, generally adding to the strain already evident on this core group of angry women. Like a spider at the centre of her web, Violet presides over the fallout, spewing forth her vitriol from the head of the dinner table. With her oversized glasses and post-punk wig, Streep seems to be channelling an ageing Noel Gallagher. She is on regal and malevolent form here, stumbling and slurring her way through a haze of partly drug-induced rage.

The dinner scene is wonderfully over the top, perhaps just beaten by Thyestes in its focus on the sharing and preparation of food as a catalyst for familial indigestion. Violet's words become increasingly difficult to swallow, culminating in an outrageous meltdown from Barbara. Julia Roberts is on great form here, although I thought Julianne Nicholson gave the most nuanced and sympathetic performance in her portrayal of the much-maligned Ivy. These actors are able to do justice to Letts's fantastic script, which seethes with decades of untold tension. It is impossible to explain its brilliance out of context, but watch out for the line 'you never know when you might need a kidney.'

Yes, Osage County is theatrical and melodramatic. But so are families when they are brought together, although it is only those on the inside who see the full extent of the madness. We're all in the dining room with the Westons here, and it is an invitation I would happily accept again.