Things Heat Up Inside and Outside An Oklahoman House

'August: Osage County'. A film starring Meryl streep and Julia Roberts.


   "This is the Plains," Barbara (Julia Roberts) corrects her husband Bill (Ewan McGregor) who thinks Oklahoma state is part of the American Midwest. And she adds as they and their 14 year-old daughter (Abigail Breslin)  exit their car, "Goddamn, it's hot."
    It's hot inside the dark Weston household too as a family re-unites in Osage County, Oklahoma, to mourn the death of poet and family patriarch Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) Weston's widow Violet(Meryl Streep) is a cancer-surviving, pill-popping, chain-smoking abuser. Violet has problems standing up, but she does tend to see all of her family's secrets.
      Barbara, is just like her mother Violet. She's bound to clash with Violet and does. Another of Violet's daughters is Karen a gabby Florida resident who babbles on and on about her life. Yet Violet soon intuits that Karen's sleazy fiance played by Dermot Mulroney, has been married many times before. Stay-at-home daughter Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) has fallen in love with slacker Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberpatch).
   Violet senses this romance too. Little Charlie is the supposed son of Violet's sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and Charlie (Chris Cooper). Mattie Fae and Charlie  also show up to mourn and fight.
     Yet Ivy and Little Charlie's romance can go nowhere. Then there's Johna(Misty Upham) who's the live-in cook and caregiver. She watches over this totally dysfunctional brood with dignity and compassion, which seem rare qualities in this house.
    A memorial dinner brings the whole film to a brutal climax. Director John Wells frames Tracy Letts's Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name 'August:Osage County' as a battle between two prime time abusers, namely Violet and daughter Barbara. Letts also wrote the film's script.
     "My mother was a mean old lady," Violet tells her three daughters one night in the back
yard. So is Ivy - and Barbara.
       Director Wells gives us some beautiful views of the flat, broiling, sun-baked Oklahoman wheat fields. Yet as another reviewer points out, "No one in the film seems to be sweating." Also some of the scenes are too jumbled together. Yet that's probably the result of shrinking a three-hour play into a two-hour picture.
     Over 50 years ago, I travelled through Oklahoma twice in the summertime. I'm glad I went to see this film but I'm glad I never met up with the Weston family on my long ago journeys through Oklahoma.

A Folk Singer Failure

 'Inside Llewyn Davis'. A film directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. Starring Oscar Isaac.


     "Success has a thousand parents," U.S. president John F. Kennedy once said. "But failure is an orphan." Llewyn Davis, played by Oscar Isaac is a folk singer in the age of Kennedy. He's a failure but not an orphan. For his father, a retired seaman, lies old and mute in an old seaman's home.
      'Inside Llewyn Davis' is a sad journey through the folk singing world of New York City in the early 1960's. Shivering in the winter cold, and without an overcoat but carrying a cat, Davis travels on a nightmare journey from New York to Chicago, and back again.
     Based loosely on the life of folk singer Dave Van Ronk, the film ends sadly. Davis lies beaten up in a night time street. Meanwhile the young Bob Dylan has started singing  his way to wealth and success  inside the cafe where Davis just performed, perhaps for the very last time. In real life Van Ronk taught Dylan a lot about folk music but this is not in the film.
      "Everything you touch turns to shit," Davis's sometime lover and now pregnant woman shouts at him. "You are shit."
     It may be true and the film's directors, the Coen brothers. have given us a very gloomy glimpse of early 1960's New York City. The film comes alive when Davis picks up a guitar and sings. In fact Justin Timberlake is doing the vocals.
      Yet the folk music is the high point of 'Being Llewyn Davis'. The rest of the film is just one long downer.