Movie Review: August: Osage County (release date Jan 10/14)

I really wanted to like this film. The premise, the actors, the fact that it centers on a family of real grown ups (not 50 somethings playing 30 somethings with teenagers who are 20 somethings). I was looking forward to watching an American film in which the actors play their ages (it seems of late that when an American movie requires grandparents who actually look like grandparents and NOT the evil browed botox caricatures Hollywood passes off as grandparents they have to fly in British actors whose attempts at American accents sounds as if they have a flute up their nose) and WHAT ACTORS: Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Juliette Lewis, Ewan McGregor et al. From the promos it seemed the film would deal with real issues. Well, this film does have issues, all right. Buckets, wheelbarrows, truckloads of issues. There were so many issues I thought I had gotten lost on Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, but without the realism -- this was the same white trash but living in a bigger house, and had they been living in a hovel this film would have been attacked as classist in the extreme. Incest (suggested), infidelity, addiction, alcoholism, racism, manipulation, bullying, greed, lying, stealing. It was so hard to find any redeeming quality in any of the characters that it was hard deciding who to hate or who to blame. The mom, Meryl Streep, might make a good scapegoat/punching bag for all the family's problems, but her ho of a sister (or sister in law, I forget and who cares) is no better, and neither are her kids. They go on and on and on and on about their junkie mom but have they ever really tried to help her? And moan about their poor, poor dad, the drunk, as if the fact that he doesn't need a prescription filled to get his mojo and no one in the family ever brings his scotch consumption up since he's such a great guy because he's never been to rehab makes him some kind of saint for sticking by his pill popping wife! One of the daughters wants to marry her cousin, which is creepy enough but when she finds out from her mom that he is her half brother (without the mom knowing she had the hots for him in the first place) she blames the mother for, for, for, WHAT EXACTLY? For never telling them their dear old dad was such a dog and was for years screwing their nice Aunt Mattie? The daughters all play "who's the bigger martyr" although they really don't seem to give a damn about anyone but themselves. Even when Julia Roberts has had enough at a family dinner, freaks out at her mom then flushes all her mom's pills down the toilet, exactly who is she doing this for? If her mother's pill addiction is as bad as they make out, wouldn't abruptly stopping the pills put her into intensive care? There really was no one in the film that was worth caring about, or rooting for, or even mourning. In terms of acting, well, it would be impossible to not over-act with such scenarios and such a script, and the actors in this film do not let us down in that regard. The mom's ability to talk non stop for 20 minute intervals without taking a breath while suffering from MOUTH CANCER(!!) and puffing a cigarette at the same time is admirable, and reminds me somewhat of King Lear's hefty dramatic monologues but with a lot of smoke. So if you want to see one of modern cinema's greatest actors (Streep) pull that off, I suppose it's worth the price of admission. And even though he was a lying philandering drunk, ultimately the dad really isn't so bad. He had the sense to off himself at the start of the film, which I was itching to do to myself half way through!