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.