Film Carew: August: Osage County

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

August: Osage County is barely a minute old before Meryl Streep comes bumbling down the stairs, all ravages-of-chemo hairpiece and theatrical stagger, as the pill-poppin' harridan presiding - via malicious tongue and menacing eye - over the bitter, bickering ensemble cast of this lamentable Oscar chaser. Her overacting is so horrendous it immediately punts 'suspension-of-disbelief' out the window, onto the mythical Oklahoma Plains which're evoked, herein, as the stuff as true, hard, frontier America. When the grand old cowboy Sam Shepard - perhaps the laziest casting shorthand for lost American masculinity - dies, so too does his Old West: the place where drunken poets refused to turn on the air-conditioning.

We'll leave you and your dirty mind alone, Julia...

With the patriarch dead, this family-of-women must be gathered. And from the instant Streep and Julia Roberts first share a scene, they commence unloading long-held resentments, unspoken truths, and shameful family secrets. Normally these family-gathering dramas take a while for the friendly façade to crack and the catharsis to come, but at the height of a sweaty summer, no one in Osage County's got time to be frosty. This means the alarm-bells first sounded by Streep's opening-scene scenery-chewing are tolling as if on a von Trier cloud once her screechery is matched by kith and kin. If they're already hurling one-uppity invective in the first reel, where is this awful film heading next?

The answer, sadly, is to bigger, stupider places; and darker, more ridiculous secrets. Writer Tracy Letts - who adapts his own stage-play to screen - has been hailed for his work, but August: Osage County is badly written. Forget that it's a sophomoric riff on old Tennessee Williams clichés: every character is introduced as a caricature that they never break free from. Juliette Lewis is the slutty sister, Julianne Nicholson the dowdy one. Benedict Cumberbatch the hopeless, luckless fool infantilised by his “big fat” momma Margo Martindale; Chris Cooper his emasculated pa. Ewan McGregor is the uptight husband uncomfortable in this “madhouse”, Abigal Breslin his antisocial goth daughter, Dermot Mulroney as Lewis's cheeseball fiancée.

A lesson in slutty sister posing.

Mulroney's character is made instantaneous dickwad: he appears behind the wheel of a red convertible, Livin' La Vida Loca on blast. When he stands too close to Breslin and leans in to smell her hair, the signposting is big and stupid: sure enough, soon he's getting her stoned and asking to see her breasts. Which leads to one of the film's endless instances of noxious dramatic excess, with Misty Upham swinging a shovel and five people howling at the top of their lungs. The vast cast of famous faces is part of the Oscar-bait package, but the logic of casting a Scot and an Englishman (the latter whose accent sounds as convincing as Meryl's cancer-head looks) in a film about deep roots in rough soil should be loudly questioned. Letts grew up on The Plains, but any concept of 'authenticity' is laughable: this is a parlour game of celebrity dress-ups that feels like the trans-Atlantic cousin to those awful English working-class dramas in which drunken dads yell “fookin'” then hit their wives.

As if swearing is shorthand for 'real' drama, Letts goes to town with the seven-words-you-can't-say-on-TV. One of the few - and most minor - pleasures comes hearing Julia Roberts (in perhaps the film's least-awful performance) gleefully trample on her America's sweetheart rep with a turn that's 50% curse; including a scene in which she cycles through vaginal euphemisms. Along with the swearing and the screeching and the family-gathering-as-cackle-of-braying-hyenas, there's also thrown bottles, turned-over tables, and broken crockery. A scene in which Roberts, Streep, and Nicholson all smash plates summons repressed memories of American Beauty - that terrible scene in which Annette Bening's odious caricature hurls her dinner as cheap dramatic stunt - and the association seems all too apt.

Guuurrrlllll, hold-up!

14 years ago, the Hollywood-Awards-Show Complex shovelled that shitty movie down our collective craw, convincing the world - if not itself - that its muddled middle-aged-male fantasy was a work of important art. It was awful at the time, and is even worse in hindsight. August: Osage County feels all too similar. Even if the Weinstein Company lobbies Streep's ham-fisted performance, Letts' lumbering writing, and John Well's televisual direction into making this movie a mighty Oscar titan, that's only a commentary on Hollywood politicking, not its actual worth. It's actually fucking awful.