I am a little bit floored by the lack of enthusiasm this film has garnered from the critics and media, this is because literally from the moment it started there were elements there to impress, full of promise of an incredibly powerful performance drama. This promise was fulfilled to the hundredth power, but even beyond that the story, tone and situations of the piece kept us invested right to the last frame.
Adapted by Tracy Letts and based on his Pulitzer Prize–winning play of the same name, it's August in Osage County and the Weston family are all brought back together at their family home, when the patriarch of the family disappears. The daughters (Julia Roberts, Juliette Lewis and Julianne Nicholson) now back at home, are hauling all their family baggage with them, and their distraught, ill and prescription-drug addicted mother Vi (Violet, played by the supreme Meryl Streep), is all too willing to start flinging all their baggage in their faces and all up the walls and around the house.
What follows is a heart-wrenching drama with hysterically funny moments brilliantly peppered throughout, the kind that only a brutally honest look at a dysfunctional family in crisis can produce.
Another thing that followed from this movie was another Best Actress Oscar nominated performance for Meryl Streep (Julia Roberts would get a Best Supporting Actress nomination). I have posted previously about Meryl Streep and her Oscar nominated run, there has, and will be, ample opportunity to muse over this, she is the most nominated actor in Oscar history. My general feelings are that Meryl Streep is great, that there is a reason her peers hold her in high regard, but that sometimes it just feels that she can be nominated, and even win, because she'd Meryl. This brings me to the Iron Lady, and my feelings here strongly reside in the feeling that after recently watching My Week with Marilyn, and being a huge fan of Rooney Mara in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that even though she was particularly good in The Iron Lady, that she won in a large part because after so many nominations it was time to give it to Meryl - alot of people will disagree, but in my defense let me just say that while I feel Rooney Mara was horribly overlooked in 2012, Meryl Streep was outright robbed at this years awards because she had won the award but two years previously.
Meryl Streep is fantastic in the role of Violet Weston in August: Osage County, a character who is both endearing and then again totally polarisingly horrible . This is a performance which should forever be studied in acting classes, it is nothing short of transformative. I was just blown away from the moment Violet appeared on screen, this was not Meryl Streep, she quite literally became another person. In so much as people believe that she became Margaret Thatcher (and I still have to rewatch that performance for this blog, although I don't believe I will ever agree that it was better than Rooney Mara's Lisbeth Salander), for me that was make-up but this performance is astoundingly, smack me upside the head, shock me to the core, I acknowledge that you are the greatest that ever was (as you have been previously referred), brilliant in it's genius. You can see why it was that when Julia Roberts spoke in an interview about her first working job with Meryl, that she started crying. I have seen Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine, and Meryl outright wins in my opinion.
We can't not touch on Julia Roberts now. Julia plays very true to Julia in this movie, it's no great transformative role, although it is refreshing that she is not in Romance movie mode, or playing to the camera, what it is is a role that feels extremely authentic, and while not as jaw-droppingly perception-changing as Meryl in this movie, the emotional sweep and arc Julia Roberts' character traverses in this movie is impressively deserving of the Oscar nomination (and I still have to watch 12 Years a Slave, so let's hold on opinion for now).
The big smile for me in this moment is the casting of Juliette Lewis, always been a fan I say! I miss Juliette Lewis, there just isn't enough of her in movies these days, no doubt she is and has always been a force to be reckoned with, but that force needs a vehicle on which it can yet again Natural Born Killer itself. And this movie is full of a cast who are given opportunity to excercise acting chops in a collaborative event which again highlights the power of a supporting cast, so with out further adieu, good work Ewan McGregor, Abigail Breslin, Chris Cooper; "The Otter" Benedict Cumberbatch; Margo Martindale; Dermot Mulroney; Julianne Nicholson; Sam Shepard and Misty Upham!
The last point to touch on before I sign off is the treatment of family dysfuction in this movie, I guess at some level everyone can relate, we all have issues in our families,and while chances are that you are blessed to not have issues of the magnitude of the Weston family, some of us unfortunately do. This is what I think resonates so powerfully from this film, the ability to recognise that even at it's most extreme the honesty of the performances make this movie spell-binding. I loved this movie, I could muse about it forever, but I'm not going to, I am just going to applause a stellar cast in delivering a movie which has kept me ready to watch it again, I love watching a movie that you wish would never end and that you know you will rewatch again at given opportunities. Highly, Highly Recommended!
Nearly done with the selection of movies from the 86th Academy Awards (even with the addition of the screenplay categories, which only added one additional movie to the list, the can't wait to watch Before Midnight). August: Osage County is Oscar movie #70!!!!
nuff said...
No comments:
Post a Comment