Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
Cast: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Ewan McGregor, Chris Cooper, Abigail Breslin, Benedict Cumberbatch, Juliette Lewis, Margo Martindale, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepherd, Misty Upham.
August: Osage County, a beautiful, flat and hot place to visit but you wouldn’t want to be related a particular family that resides there.
When renowned published poet Beverly Weston decides to take his own life, the can of spiteful and mean-spirited worms come flooding out everywhere and into the lives of the family members left behind, chiefly in the viscous tongue of drug addicted cancer patient of his wife Violet Weston. Nobody is immune, and like a disease floating free in the air, multiplies and takes root in the actions of some of those around her until words are said that become too much to bear.
There can never be any doubt over Ms. Streep’s contribution to cinema. Prolific, visually brilliant on screen and her ability to throw herself into a role, to make it something that no other female actor could ever play without referencing Ms. Streep is laudable and a credit to the prestige she brings to any film. It is just sometimes the films she performs in can leave you cold, not her fault at all, not one bit, however it sometimes reflects on her and there will always be those that are only too willing to knock her personally for them. In August: Osage County this is a film in which surely everybody will applauded her role as the mouth cancer sufferer Violet Weston.
If not for Meryl Streep giving arguably her finest performance in years and one of the best in her lifetime on screen and the superb Julia Roberts as her daughter Barbara and a great performance by Chris Cooper then the film might not have the appeal that it has. Away from these roles, there is the feeling of miscast, of some actors being dropped into the film for who they are and to see the film have a bigger audience away from its core American viewer. Reluctantly seeing Benedict Cumberbatch, a man who makes acting feel as if it the wonderful pursuits on Earth and one of the best at what he does, almost flounder in abject apology in his time on screen is disturbing. From his superb appearance in 12 Years A Slave to playing “Little Charles” Aiken is like comparing landing on the moon to drinking a can of flat pop, one deserves adulation, the other you have to shake your head at wonder why.
It is though the fantastic acting supplied by Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep, two women pulled together by the death of the pair’s father and husband, the look of absolute hatred and disgust that passes between the two as they recognise themselves in the other that makes the film worthy of praise. The stifling family atmosphere that haunts the screen, the manipulation bought about a festering illness and the family unit gone sour and ultimately destroyed is testament to Tracy Letts’ colossus of a play on which the film is taken from.
August: Osage County is worth catching at the cinema purely for the satisfaction of seeing a wonderful play bought to a bigger audience and the extra scenery it brings and for the two main characters bought to life by the superb Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep. Family gatherings will never be the same again.
Ian D. Hall