John Wells (2013)
It’s a theatre piece – and never so obviously as in the penultimate scene of this screen adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, first staged in 2007. (Letts did the screenplay.) The addled matriarch Violet Weston vainly calls out the names of her daughters, who’ve now departed the family home in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. To stop the silence, Violet puts on a record, and dances wanly to the music for a few moments. Then she takes refuge in the arms of Johnna, her Native American cook and carer (Violet has oral cancer and an addiction to prescription drugs), whose presence in the house she previously resented but who is now the only other human being left on the premises. John Wells cuts from this to Violet’s eldest daughter, Barbara, driving away from Pawhuska. She stops and gets out of her station wagon, takes a deep breath of fresh air in the empty countryside, gets back in the car and resumes her escape. This postscript is tacked on, so that the movie ends, out in the Oklahoma plains, looking like a movie: but the wailing for company in a nearly empty house, music on a gramophone etc must surely, in the theatre, be the final scene of August: Osage County.
Violet’s husband Beverly, an alcoholic poet, provides a prologue to the action in the film as he must have done on stage. He addresses the camera and summarises his marriage to Violet before disappearing to commit suicide. One of the couple’s three daughters, Ivy, is unmarried and still lives at home but Barbara and her other sister, Karen, have visited for their father’s funeral. The centrepiece to August: Osage County is the family dinner that follows the funeral; with nearly the whole cast at table, this is what all the preceding action has been leading up to. The multiple tensions among the characters coalesce into a full-blown venom-fest, with Violet, at the head of the table, dispensing most of the poison. David Denby in the New Yorker couldn’t understand why someone didn’t get up and go for a walk or a smoke when the conversation round the table got really nasty – and the improbability of people staying put often is a valid criticism of movie versions of stage plays. (Carnage is a recent example.) But not here: the whole point is that domineering Violet’s family feels compelled to sit the dinner out, even though it’s hardly in their interests to do so.
August: Osage County is highly entertaining – the dinner especially so – but John Wells never seems to decide whether he wants to disguise or emphasise its stage origins. He opens up the action with a world outside yet shoots the interlocutors mostly in close-up – from one to the other to the next – during their barbed exchanges. Tracy Letts has supplied some cracking lines and Wells want the audience to hear them all; in spite of the characters’ feelings running as high as they do, there’s little overlapping dialogue. (The cast’s audibility is so refreshing that I could forgive this.) I don’t see enough theatre to know but August: Osage County, if the film is faithful to the play, appears to be structurally old-fashioned, even as a work for the stage – especially in what follows the dinner. Family secrets, recent and from years back, are serially revealed: what happened to Bev between his disappearance and his suicide; who fathered Violet’s nephew, ‘Little’ Charles; Violet tells her daughters an anecdote from childhood to demonstrate that she was fucked-up-in-her-turn[1]. According to David Denby, the events of August are taking place in 2007 but there are details that make it seem set in the past and this connects with your sense that this is an antique dramatic construction: when Violet and her sister Mattie Fae look through a box of family snapshots, they’re black-and-white although the photos must have been taken in the 1970s or 1980s; and there’s that gramophone (a CD player just wouldn’t be the same theatrically). I’d guess that August: Osage County, on stage, is one of those pieces that enable a group of actors to develop a momentum so strong it’s almost self-validating – and keeps at bay the audience’s awareness of the melodramatic mechanisms. On screen, merely shooting a scene outdoors is enough to remind you of those mechanisms. This is not a movie for auteurists but it’s absorbing for anyone interested in the art of screen acting and in how a piece like this should be directed on screen. You don’t really believe August: Osage County, even as an entry in the all-unhappy-families stakes. Yet the different kinds of playing on display make it absorbing – and create a weird sort of balance.
In the play, as I understand it, the part of Barbara is bigger than the part of Violet. It doesn’t seem that way on screen although the effect may be magnified by how John Wells puts Meryl Streep at the centre of the movie. Her performance is meat and drink to her detractors (she’s had some bad reviews) and it’s certainly an instance, by no means the first, of a director seeming to be so grateful to have Streep in their film that they don’t direct her enough. (It’s striking that she’s worked more and more rarely with major film-makers.) Wells seems to want to close in on Streep’s face the better to admire her acting but doing this doesn’t always do her a favour: the effect can be like sitting in the front rows of the stalls and being able to see an actor’s technique in a way you wouldn’t see if you were further back. Streep – in a dark wig, which is removed in a couple of scenes – is compelling, though, and does some great things. I liked Violet’s repeated, unconscious arm movement whereby she almost embraces herself – as if she’s the only person she can depend on to give her affection. Streep’s telling to the daughters the story of the boots Violet wanted, one Christmas when she was a girl, is gripping and brilliant. Violet Weston is a bully and, like most bullies, the first to complain when on the receiving end: Streep makes seamless transitions from hectoring to whimpering and back. There are things wrong too: her eagerness to home in on the next acting opportunity occasionally comes across as over-eagerness, as when, for example, Violet roots for a dog-end in an ashtray; and there are times when you feel Streep has decided how to read a line regardless of how the one that’s fed to her is delivered. (The director should have intervened when this happens.)
Yet there’s an essential and satisfying connection between Meryl Streep’s histrionic barrage and Violet Weston’s self-dramatising tyranny. Violet makes the rules for the funeral dinner. At its start, she reminds the family this is a solemn occasion: it’s a sweltering day but she deplores the men’s removal of their jackets and they meekly put them back on. She then keeps changing the rules. All that matters to Violet is that she’s in charge and the centre of attention, and these unlovely qualities chime with characteristics of Meryl Streep as an actress. They are reasons that some people dislike her but which are part of her fascination to me. (I don’t watch anyone else the way I watch her. I’m still excited before the start of any film she’s in and I never approach dozing when she’s on the screen.) Violet Weston has flavours of Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a larger kinship with Regina Giddens in The Little Foxes. David Denby’s comparison of Meryl Streep’s acting in August: Osage County and Bette Davis’s in The Little Foxes prompted a further comparison – with Pauline Kael’s criticism of the latter (although you can be sure Kael would have been even harsher about Streep). Denby notes that Davis ‘keeps things small, mean, and tight; she scales to the camera. Streep overwhelms it’. Kael felt that:
‘Bette Davis’s tight, dry performance was probably a mistake; her Regina is so villainous that this version of Lillian Hellman’s play about a Southern family of predators doesn’t have the temperament and drive that Tallulah Bankhead gave it on the stage.’
Although Regina Giddens is a more dangerous woman than Violet Weston, the latter is so relentlessly selfish and vicious that she’d be intolerable to watch and listen to it if she weren’t the flamboyant monster that Meryl Streep makes her. The film’s opening scene, in which Violet, off her head, lists down the stairs and into her husband’s study to interrupt his monologue, seems misconceived – here too, John Wells is telling the audience, as if they needed to know, they’re in the presence of a great actress. Yet it does serve a valuable dramatic purpose, in the piano moment when Violet inclines her forehead to touch her husband’s: Streep and Sam Shepard, who makes an impression in his small role strong enough to last the film, convey a sense of something that’s kept these two unhappy people married to each other for years, for all that their life together is about to end.
I think it’s the case that getting this project together was stop-start for quite some time and that Julia Roberts, who plays Barbara, was a prime mover in making it happen and in getting Meryl Streep for the role of Violet. (The film was eventually produced by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, among others.) Roberts has said in interview that having Streep in the cast made the others raise their game – that’s certainly true of her own performance, rightly praised as her best in years. Barbara has to do plenty of listening to the more loquacious members of her family and Roberts is extraordinarily good when she’s saying little or nothing – as when Barbara has to suffer the youngest sister, Karen, rattling on about her latest man – or when she delivers a determinedly level riposte. Roberts is less comfortable when the action of August: Osage County is at its most garish, when Barbara is physically fighting with Violet at the climax to the dinner or, earlier on, in a brief yelling match with her about-to-be-ex-husband Bill. Stephanie Zacharek evidently sees it as one of her roles as a critic to say the unkind things about Meryl Streep that Pauline Kael is no longer around to say. Zacharek’s review of August majors on that but she’s right that Julia Roberts ‘keeps pulling the story back into the territory of movies’. Roberts, whose core of sanity surfaces whenever Barbara can get some distance from her family, deserves those closing moments on the open road, even if they are a false appendage. (I wasn’t sure where the station wagon in which Barbara escapes came from: she arrives for the funeral in the car that Bill uses to take their daughter away in, long before the end.)
Although the part of Karen is obviously written, Juliette Lewis gives it vitality and humour and Dermot Mulroney is very good as her new boyfriend, Steve. The grace at the start of the family meal is one of the highlights of the film. This is principally thanks to Chris Cooper, as Violet’s brother-in-law Charles, who’s asked – as the new patriarch of the clan – to say the grace. (‘By default,’ as Violet sharply reminds the gathering.) Charles can’t think what to say – except for a moment when the religious-sounding word ‘replenish’ enters his head and makes him fluent for a sentence or two. Mulroney also is excellent here: Steve’s mobile goes off; he takes the call in both embarrassment and relief but finds the grace still going on when he returns to the table. Margo Martindale is very effective as Mattie Fae: here too, there’s a correspondence between character and performer that works well, and which partly overcomes the obviousness of the ‘shock’ revelation that Little Charles was fathered by Bev. At this moment, Mattie Fae tells Barbara resentfully that she’s ‘more than’ the jolly, comical aunt that Violet’s daughters have always seen her as – and Margo Martindale, who’s been mostly funny until now, expresses something similar as an actress. Chris Cooper combines marvellous comic timing with effortless emotional depth: he’s terrific when he’s consoling Little Charles, who’s upset at arriving too late for the funeral, and when he’s tearing a strip off Mattie Fae for being unkind to her son. I’m not sure why Benedict Cumberbatch (Little Charles) and Ewan McGregor (Bill) were cast rather than Americans but both do well. Abigail Breslin may struggle because of how she looks to get decent, ‘grown-up’ roles in the coming years but she shows a lot of wit as Barbara’s daughter, Jean. Misty Upham underplays nicely as Johnna.
The awkward, possibly dim Little Charles offers Ivy Weston her chance to escape from home and to be happy. Ivy is so traumatised by the news that Little Charles is not her cousin but her half-brother that she leaves anyway. Julianne Nicholson is lovely as Ivy, quietly but strongly expressive as the fireworks keep going off around her. At the moment of Ivy’s unhappy discovery and exit, Nicholson, because she’s so affecting, makes you annoyed with the melodramatic construction of the piece – annoyed that the actors are struggling to create truth in the face of theatrical contrivance, even though they often succeed. Gustavo Santaolalla has written a good score, with hints of sadness that the film needs – for the most part, the amusing, vitriolic dysfunction overwhelms any other notes. This is why Julianne Nicholson’s contribution has such impact – although there are other touching bits – such as Charles offering Little Charles a comb for his hair, or Mattie Fae telling all to Barbara. August: Osage County goes on a bit too long after the dinner and its natural habitat is never the screen. But it’s a couple of hours in the cinema that I really enjoyed.
26 January 2014
[1] Although Bev’s opening prologue and the stagy last scene in the house bookend the movie, Letts has resisted ending as well as beginning the screenplay with lines from T S Eliot’s The Hollow Men. At the start, Bev quotes one of the poem’s final lines (‘Life is very long’); in the stage play, according to Wikipedia, Johnna also rounds things off with ‘This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends …’.
