August: Osage County (15.)
Directed by John Wells.
Starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor and Margo Martindale. 121 mins.
Sam Shepherd makes a distinguished appearance in the opening scene playing a poet with a serious drinking problem. He then excuses himself, exits stage left (or right) to go and get himself dead, thus avoiding all the caterwauling hullaballoo that ensues. That lucky man.
Given that his character has been married to Meryl Streep for five decades he’d earned his passage. After playing Thatcher, Streep seems to have got a taste for blood. She’s playing a monster, monstrously, a mother who draws her extended family together for the funeral and uses the occasion to spit her venom at them. This may be top notch, high quality thespianics, and the Academy may even feel obliged to throw an Oscar in its direction (ideally at some speed) but there is precious little reason for any sane person to offer up two hours of their life for it.
This is not a film, but a piece of theatre that has escaped from captivity. Playwright Tracy Letts (he played Senator Lockhart in the latest season of Homeland) had a big hit Off Broadway with the play and has adapted it himself for the screen. Two of his previous plays, Killer Joe and Bug, were filmed by William Friedkin who at least tried to conceal the stage craft. August is shamelessly theatrical and theatre in its most rudimentary form. A family gathering, after a funeral, three sisters (a pretty one, a plain one, a crazy one), feuds boil over, historic bitterness explodes and deep secrets are revealed. This play is as generic and formulaic as a Stallone cop movie. It is packed with spiky insults that qualify as witty and sophisticated on stage (and will win you a Pulitzer Prize) but sound clumsy and forced on screen.
It is preposterously star studded. While McGregor looks on from the sides as if he had forgotten why he was supposed to be here, Cumberbatch plunges in gamely doing his best stage idiot and comes across looking a little foolish. Cooper and Martindale are entertaining but Julia Roberts probably fares best because her performance is scaled in movie terms.
Directed by John Wells.
Starring Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor and Margo Martindale. 121 mins.
Sam Shepherd makes a distinguished appearance in the opening scene playing a poet with a serious drinking problem. He then excuses himself, exits stage left (or right) to go and get himself dead, thus avoiding all the caterwauling hullaballoo that ensues. That lucky man.
Given that his character has been married to Meryl Streep for five decades he’d earned his passage. After playing Thatcher, Streep seems to have got a taste for blood. She’s playing a monster, monstrously, a mother who draws her extended family together for the funeral and uses the occasion to spit her venom at them. This may be top notch, high quality thespianics, and the Academy may even feel obliged to throw an Oscar in its direction (ideally at some speed) but there is precious little reason for any sane person to offer up two hours of their life for it.
This is not a film, but a piece of theatre that has escaped from captivity. Playwright Tracy Letts (he played Senator Lockhart in the latest season of Homeland) had a big hit Off Broadway with the play and has adapted it himself for the screen. Two of his previous plays, Killer Joe and Bug, were filmed by William Friedkin who at least tried to conceal the stage craft. August is shamelessly theatrical and theatre in its most rudimentary form. A family gathering, after a funeral, three sisters (a pretty one, a plain one, a crazy one), feuds boil over, historic bitterness explodes and deep secrets are revealed. This play is as generic and formulaic as a Stallone cop movie. It is packed with spiky insults that qualify as witty and sophisticated on stage (and will win you a Pulitzer Prize) but sound clumsy and forced on screen.
It is preposterously star studded. While McGregor looks on from the sides as if he had forgotten why he was supposed to be here, Cumberbatch plunges in gamely doing his best stage idiot and comes across looking a little foolish. Cooper and Martindale are entertaining but Julia Roberts probably fares best because her performance is scaled in movie terms.
