August: Osage County the movie- Page 3

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 1/6/14 at 11:55pm

^^^ I'd drink that right up.

[silent]

Posted: 1/7/14 at 6:21am

The movie probably would have been better served without the stunt casting. I'm tired of Meryl hogging all the roles. Sissy, Jessica Lange or Susan Sarandon would all have been better picks. I don't even see this movie grossing back the 20 mil. But stranger things have happened.

[The Other One]

Posted: 1/7/14 at 7:56am

This is the one Streep performance, or at least the first in many years, that I don't think works at all. She's acting much too hard, as though she knows she has a great role and must sink every tooth into it.

I don't think the movie would have been that much better without her all the same. The material comes off as high-brow reality TV on screen, at least as scripted and directed here. If it isn't exactly bad, it is disappointing.

[WiCkEDrOcKS]

Posted: 1/9/14 at 2:33am

Saw it tonight, and I mostly liked it, but it's important to say I liked it on its own terms. That is to say that it can't hold a candle to the stage version, but it's an entertaining film in its own right. I really do think the whole thing could have benefitted from cutting less from the original text (I mean, just for a few examples -out of many-, WOLF OF WALL STREET is running just barely under three hours; THE HELP was 2.5 hours long, DJANGO was 2:45, and all were well-received and made quite a good amount of money at the box office. If a movie's excessive length is justified, I don't see the problem. And the original text of A:OC is a masterwork, IMO. I think that justifies a 2.5+ hour film.) At times, it feels a bit like a Sparknotes version of the play. Had I not seen the show and loved it so much, I probably would have liked the film more. Alternately, though, I'm glad they didn't just slap the stage version on screen without opening it up and adapting it for the film universe, which is an entirely different from the theater universe. We've seen all too many stage to film adaptations that are slavish and just feel stagebound. It was great to see the dinner table scene left (mostly) untouched.

The cast is really fantastic. Streep is frighteningly good (shocker) and Julia Roberts' performance should shut all of her haters up for quite some time. Also worth noting are Julianne Nicholson, Chris Cooper, and Margo Martindale.

It's also being marketed all wrong. From the first trailer, they've been pitching it as some off-kilter comedy, which it's just not. There are a handful of campy moments, but I would hardly call the film pure camp. Unfortunately, by cutting so much of the character and plot development from the stage version (as well as a curious lack of dramatic tension), a lot of the revelations and a few moments here and there do feel campy. There's a severely unfortunate lack of an emotional punch in this adaptation.


But it's enjoyable and entertaining, even if it's not really a fair representation of Letts' original masterpiece. The performances alone make it worth seeing.

Sorry if my thoughts are scattered. Updated On: 1/9/14 at 02:33 AM

[The Other One]

Posted: 1/9/14 at 7:40am

The edits are particularly harmful. With little downtime between big revelations, it starts to seem a little ridiculous. One big moment after another.

Streep is in mid-60's Bette Davis/Joan Crawford mode here. I could see why people might like her, but, again, I thought she was chomping scenery (and Davis would have been a lot more entertaining). The others were quite good. Julia's enemies are given nothing to say nay about here, and I would add Juliette Lewis and Dermot Mulroney to your list of the film's strong supporting actors. Ewan and Benedict are not ideal choices for their roles, though.

[promisespromises2]

Posted: 1/9/14 at 12:28pm

"Sissy, Jessica Lange or Susan Sarandon would all have been better picks. I don't even see this movie grossing back the 20 mil. But stranger things have happened."

YOU need to cast the movies from now on! Crimes of the Heart reunion plus Susan Sarandon… yes please.

I'm actually excited to see this movie and am prepared to watch it at face value.

[strummergirl]

Posted: 1/9/14 at 1:12pm

Saw it. I'd give it ***/*****. Nothing too egregious in the direction but the adaptation choices made by Letts had some good choices and not so good choices. The good choices were mixing Bev's monologue with talking to Johnna to work for him and Violet. But the other issues (people call this an editing issue but really it is just truncating the play), the strongest performers (and poor Misty Upham who has not much to do in this) have their scenes cut down when to me their presences throughout are what make the revelations so impacting. I liked most of the performances but certain castings just don't work in ways that make a good portion of the film one-note.

Let me just say I actually think Meryl Streep is really great in this. She has the physicality of Violet and when she is with Shepherd, Cooper, Martindale, and Nicholson- it's great. These feel like real family members with a history. Shepherd, Cooper, and Martindale definitely lend authenticity to regional aspects of the Aiken-Weston clan. Nicholson as the more plain Jane daughter also feels authentic and her scenes with Benedict Cumberbatch's Little Charles are so sweet. Cumberbatch does not quite hit the most natural marks you want to see from Little Charles, at least in the scenes he is not Ivy. His dynamics with Martindale are in a weird spot where Margo's Mattie Fae is doing a lot of heavy lifting because her part feels truncated. Cumberbatch's dynamics with Cooper do feel right though. Still, Cumberbatch in certain parts feels like he is in actor exercises. But overall, I have no too major complaints about the Aiken-Weston dynamics except I wanted more of it.

Then, we get to the Fordhams. Julia's Barbara is actually fine when she is not with Bill or Jean. These do not feel like people you know so much as an idea of the intellectual people you see all the time and the amount of time with get these 3, Karen, and Steve feel like a whole other movie that, I don't know, I'd rather cut them down if it meant more Aiken-Weston stuff happening. Ewan McGregor is so miscast as Bill (accent, age, personality) and there feels like a lack of chemistry and tension between him and Roberts and almost no parental connection with Breslin. It's like the script wants you to assume history repeating itself except you can never buy Bill as a Bev figure or Breslin's Jean as a potential Barbara. Roberts has to carry so much of that section that it feels unfair to her, especially in the context of Streep vs. Roberts being the talking point for much of this film. Roberts feels lived in but she is often stuck with sparring partners who haven't a clue what to do besides recite lines.

Dermot Mulroney and Juliette Lewis are too broad for my taste and feel like they have come from another movie. Wells too often underlines how we should feel about them when it is plenty clear how we should react. The more they are in the background, given they are constantly on the go I'd figure that maybe by design that would've help the film a lot in the adaptation process, the better.

The only real directorial choices by Wells that I was not really into was how the claustrophobia of the film is phased out. The Weston home feels like a bus stop for crazy relatives than a hostage situation many feel are one of the strengths of the play. It's stated early in the film by Ivy that Bev and Violet have closed off their home. It's not Doubt-level bad but you don't feel the entrapment the Westons have with Violet so the dinner scene, while Cooper and Streep at each end of the table hold court very well, the boiling point just feels like a 0 to 60 jump. The 'eat the fish, Bitch' moment does much better, mainly because Julia is now without Bill or Jean and is now acting/reacting to Ivy and Julia's contempt and issues with what to do there feel like a proper chain of events. Then the ending, which could have worked if the claustrophobia actually had that feel like a release of needing to get out of the house. Otherwise, Wells gets the right camera angles, captures enough of the right facial expressions from the performers, and clearly gets both the warmth and poison of the Westons. I still wish there was another director or better yet, a writer-director who could have collaborated with Letts a little more to shave off the right characters and scenes. Wells seemed to be into the lighter than the darkness, it's true.

Anyway, there are a good set of performances but unfortunately a good chunk of the cast eat up a lot of screen-time having no clue what they are supposed to bring to the Weston dynamic while the rest of the cast has a pretty clear idea and it feels often like a battle over whether the good or bad parts can win the scene. I wouldn't call this a wasted opportunity as I really liked a lot of the performances and parts a good deal, but the Clooney-Heslov-Wells of it all rendered it to strictly a Showtime dramedy truncated into two hours than what was supposed to be a great play that instead had some of its flaws exposed. I like the play, by the way, but it feels like half the movie wanted to bite their teeth into the sitcom aspects than Greek tragedy.

I don't really see this as an Awards player with how the Weinsteins have backed off on it but I wouldn't call it camp and I don't think it has the staying power of a Steel Magnolias. It's not a Doubt, so there.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 1/10/14 at 6:31pm

An unmitigated disaster. The director had no clue how to make the material work. I laughed once: when Streep said "you never know when you might need a kidney." The play worked because the team and company knew that the way through to the tragedy was to be outlandishly theatrical and unabashedly comic (a technique similar to that on display on Bdwy now in Richard III). The result on stage was a wild ride entertainment, a lampoon of Southern gothic fiction with a splash of tenderhearted wistfulness. The movie is somber, limp and drowns in self-seriousness.

[promisespromises2]

Posted: 1/10/14 at 9:10pm

I loved it at face value, but I never saw the stage version. I've been in love with the book for years, so it was interesting to finally see it played out.

I LOVED Julianne Nicholson and Margo Martindale. I felt like they truly captured their characters (at least from what I read). I felt that Streep was trying too hard and overacting the first half of the movie and then just slowly went back to normal from then on. Julia Roberts was great, but I wish she showed way more emotion. I mean this play is dark. Really dark. I agree with henrikegerman in that I wish they ALL threw themselves into theatrics instead of Streep being the only one and for half the movie at that. Juliette Lewis, I thought, was absolutely dreadful. Her scenes were so out there that I feel like they might as well have just thrown her part out completely. Same with Abigail Breslins character.

I actually had more fun listening to peoples reactions towards the movie. For some reason I always expect people have read what is being adapted beforehand so I always get startled when I hear people in shock!

[indytallguy]

Posted: 1/10/14 at 11:26pm

Chicago Tribune's theatre critic has written a thoughtful column taking on movie critics who say the play must be flawed because they didn't like the movie.
Chris Jones on film critics

[strummergirl]

Posted: 1/10/14 at 11:57pm

I don't know, A.O. Scott's observation of Johnna's use for the play/audience and the character's race having a regional specificity was a pretty damming cold-read cover to cover. And you don't have to have seen the play to tell which are scenes feel as though they were once these stagey monologues because some performers are not really quite translating those monologues and Wells is not quite helping them along.

I know people wanted either Mike Nichols or previous Letts collaborator, William Friedkin, but I think a Jeff Nichols, a David Gordon Green, or some other young writer-director that understood that setting and could balance gothic/drama/humor also would have helped. Wells wants to over-compensate with those cuts of the Oklahoma skyline. I think he fell too in love with that whereas a director far familiar with that region would've kept the events in the house.

[AwesomeDanny]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 12:13am

I mostly enjoyed this film. It was nowhere near the greatness that the play achieved, but it was still a pretty good feat. I thought the actors were uniformly excellent and created a great ensemble. My one issue was that the director clearly didn't know how to make the material work, so the actors had to constantly rise above him to make things work. I hated how it was filmed--I constantly wanted wider camera angles and for a camera to move every so often, especially in the dinner scene. That would have given it more of the battle feel that it needs. This is a strange piece that I think really benefits from the audience being observers rather than participators.

The new moment between the second and third acts in which Violet tries to run away seemed to me like a great attempt on Tracy Lett's part to make up for the loss of the claustrophobia that would come from staying in the house (creating a sort of "no escape" feeling, which I think is what he was going for in this new scene), but the way it was directed seemed to totally miss the point. Watching Violet try to run away with swelling music underneath, I just thought "this isn't August: Osage County."

I admired Tracy Lett's skill at cutting it. I would obviously rather have had a more full version, but he did what had to be done. The one thing I missed was the scene between Johnna and Jean because without that, we know absolutely nothing about Johnna, and Jean is just a typical moody teenager. I read that Tracy Letts was made that John Wells decided to cut that for pacing reasons. He said "they didn't give us pacing notes when the play was 3 1/2 hours!"

My biggest fear going in was that Julia Roberts was miscast--I saw her as much more of an Ivy. However, she really shocked me and gave an absolutely fantastic performance. This makes me much more comfortable with the idea of her taking on the role of the doctor in The Normal Heart.

Once I stopped comparing the film to the play, I was able to appreciate it. They were trying to tell a different story. There is no way that what happened on stage could be accurately captured on film. It couldn't hold a candle to the play, but not all that many pieces can.

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 10:32am

I'm all for seeing the movie on its own terms and not comparing it to the play. And, looking at it from that lens, I have to say, on its own terms, it doesn't work at all. And then, asking why it doesn't work, I have to return to why the play worked so well. It's because the play was outlandish, hilarious, and very moving, and revealed the tragedy through absurdity in a uniquely compelling way.

But mostly, it's because the play had love. The love between the characters was omnipresent and charged the story. That is almost completely missing from the movie (with rare exceptions, Chris Cooper gave it his all, and Nicholson and Cumberbatch bring it to their scenes together).

[promisespromises2]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 11:13am

^You hit the nail on the head for me. I didn't feel the love between the characters. There was something that was missing with them. Even reading the book countless times you can feel each characters heartbreak.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 12:48pm

I liked it a lot, but yes, on its own terms. Once I accepted it wasn't gonna come anywhere near the magic of the stage show, I enjoyed it for the movie it was trying to be. It does miss a lot of the humor and the cuts actually hurt the narrative and shortchanges the twists that come in the later part of the story. Some of the punchlines are gone (Mattie Fae's "you said you were running things" line is gone!!! What????) or don't land the way they did (most notably, one of my favorite Amy Morton moments, the parakeet story has no humor in the movie).
Still, I love these characters so much and thought the actors for the most part did a good job. I don't get the Streep hate; yes, the casting is not surprising, but I thought she did a spectacular job. It's not so much that she was hamming it up as she was playing a character who loves hamming it up, she loves an audience, and she is indeed in "rare form" and Streep captured that so well. It's unfair that Julia Roberts is playing Amy Morton's character, how can one compare Amy Morton's Barbara to pretty much anyone? And no, Roberts doesn't convince me that she was the most ideal person for the role. Yet, her Barbara was interested and complicated. The rest of the cast was good with the exceptions of Benedict Cumberbatch and Ewan McGregor who was just bland.

[Hest882]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 4:59pm

Adding the SF Chronicle's review to the debate. The headline for the review--"Great Play...But a Bad Movie"--sums up the critic's take.

"But what happens if the director is relatively inexperienced at directing features? And what happens if the actress destroying the movie is rightly recognized as one of the greatest in the world? Then you have the formula for disaster - for "August: Osage County," a thoroughly botched, distorted and unrealized rendering of a brilliant American play.

The failure of this film is an occasion for more than perfunctory lamentation, because it represents something beyond a missed opportunity. Movies can be shown everywhere and movies are forever, which means that this film is bound to serve as an ongoing bad-will ambassador for a great work of art, not only around the world but also down through time. Already, intelligent people who never saw the play are speculating that perhaps the film revealed weaknesses in Tracy Letts' writing - but no, that is not the case. Not at all.

The problem was that director John Wells did not understand the play, or at the very least, he did not make his actors understand the play, even at its most basic level. Here's one little example: The actors onscreen are under the impression that they're in a straight drama, and they're not. They're in a very dark comedy.

Perhaps the tonal weirdness of the film can best be expressed this way: At least 80 percent of what's wrong with "August: Osage County" could have been solved by casting June Squibb ("Nebraska") in the lead role instead of Meryl Streep."
Full Review Here Updated On: 1/11/14 at 04:59 PM

[JamesBroadwayWiner]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 5:29pm

I don't understand why people on this site are so often negative and are quick to put down great shows. I saw the movie last night and it was absolutely one of the best movies I've seen in my life. Every single actor and actress gave the performance of a lifetime! All around, it was a beautiful and well done film. Some people on this I find are too hard to please. This was a great movie! (And so was Les Mis!)

[henrikegerman]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 6:07pm

Because we disagree with you on this one. Have you ever not liked a movie that someone else thinks is one of the best things they've ever seen in their life? You seem to think we enjoy being negative, or want to see something fail? That may be true for some people, but I assure you it's not true in my case.

Why does one feel the need to weigh in on being disappointed by the movie version of a play one liked very much? In my case, it's not that I wanted the movie to be disappointing, it's quite the opposite. I wanted to enjoy it a great deal. The fact is I didn't enjoy it at all.

My question is this, why do so many on bww take offense when a poster doesn't like something? Would you prefer we all agreed about everything and our agreement was that everything is worthy of praise, or at least good.

Not everything is worthy of praise and not everything is good. People disagree about what is and is not great, and what is and is not good. That's show business. What's more, it's human nature.

[JamesBroadwayWiner]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 6:34pm

It certainly may not be true in your case. But it certainly seems true of many people on this site. I completely understand not liking a popular show or movie but it seems like there is so much negativity on many of the posts here on broadwayworld.

[indytallguy]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 7:17pm

2/3 of the critics liked it and 3/4 of the audience according to Rotten Tomatoes, a fairly decent standard to turn to for the consensus on a flick.

It's far from being considered a great movie.

Criticism differs for me from negativity, and one of the things that happens on discussion boards is people are going to make critical observations about the art they are seeing and there are going to be differences of opinions.

Sure, there may be some posters here who are almost always negative, but I find most are critical because they want a show to be as good as it can be.

[NJBway]

Posted: 1/11/14 at 8:33pm

well lange was married 2 sam shepard so that would've worked :)

[GoSmileLaughCryClap]

Posted: 1/12/14 at 8:10pm

This is one of the more irritating threads in some time, as it brings together a number of myopic tendencies of posters who have their hearts in the right place but their brains taking a break.

1. Posts with links to negative reviews: Please be aware that there are 90 favorable reviews floating around that could be linked on this thread one by one.
2. It's Stunt Casting: How is casting multiple Academy award winning actors in a prestige movie anything resembling a stunt? (except for maybe Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in WAOVW, and that actually turned out OK)
3. How will this horrible movie even make back its investment: It was playing in a couple of theaters to great business and made 7.3 million dollars this weekend, 2 million more than expected.
4. Major film critic happily pointing out that they never saw the play: Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think when you're an important critic you should have a pretty good handle on the rest of popular performance culture happening around you. I'll have to go back to his review of Hamlet and see if he never saw the play.
5. The best/the worst movie I've ever seen: For all of you who fit in this camp it is neither. Your thrill or despair would be better served in honor of Citizen Kane or Plan 9 from Outer Space.
6. I'm so sick of Meryl Streep: Oh yeah, well I'm so sick of Judy Dench.

I could go on, but you have to admit it. This thread is full of ****ty posts.

And then there's the know it all!

OK then, I'm off to watch the Golden Globes. I eagerly await the posts when Osage County doesn't win anything. Glee and horror post by post. Yeah!

[beautywickedlover]

Posted: 1/12/14 at 11:48pm

I saw this today and since I had never sen the play I did not know it was going to be a very depressing story. Julia Roberts gave the best performance of the bunch. I thought she was flawless. Meryl Streep gave a solid performance as usual, but she overacted a bit this time around. The rest of the ensemble was very good, but I think seeing this once is enough for me.

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 1/13/14 at 1:17am

I wish I could go back and see the play again. I saw it twice, but honestly I only remember the moments from the movie, so I'd love to see what was cut out consider it's an hours worth of material. Going back and watching videos of the original Broadway cast, you can see how the tones are different. Amy Morton is just gold in the role. She's got that dry-wit that just elevates the material. And while my personal favorite is Estelle Parsons, I like the subtly performance by Deanna Dungan (or something like that?).

Streep was just too much for me. She took lines like "Blow it out your ass" and suddenly I just didn't believe anything. It was just too much. It was like her character from Prada aged 20 years.