August Osage County

[Dave (imported)]

AUGUST OSAGE COUNTY

is the adaptation of a stage play into a movie. The play is three acts and roughly three hours. The movie is more scenes and two hours.

AS one reviewer said, this is like George and Martha having kids and growing old (who's afraid of virginia wolfe). This is a movie in the grand tradition of Albee and other who give us familial dysfunction and high drama onstage in all it's ruinous splendor.

AUGUST in OSAGE COUNTY is the funeral of a poet - a man named Beverly. You see and hear him hiring a Native AMerican lady to cook and chauffeur his wife. Then he commits suicide in a boat.

His wife is MERYL STREEP and one of his daughters is JULIA ROBERTS (now do you remember this movie?"

His in-laws, children and grandchildren and their boyfriends and girlfriends attend the funeral and the dinner that follows.

WARNING: this was not the movie I should have seen less than a month after my Mom's funeral. If you have an argumentative family or family troubles or family fights that hurt then this is a tough and wicked movie. My family didn't fight. No one badgered each other but this movie still hurt. So be warned.

Now that being said. The sins of this family go deep, deep, deep and the scabs fly like confetti in Times Square at New Years.

MERYL STREEP as the mother is unrelenting in her criticism of everyone in her family. She's a pill addict and a bad one -- mean and vicious. Yes, Julia Roberts and her have a roll not the floor bitch fight. It's a tour-de-force of dysfunction. It's the pill-popping mother against the drunk and dissolute father versus their screwed-up kids and grandkids. Everyone in this family has a secret sin.

And while that fight between two great actresses might be the wowie-zowie-gosh-golly-gee action sequence -- the true emotional impact lands with both feet in a startling revelation at the end of the play.

And I ain't talking about the pot-smoking cheater getting walloped with a shovel, either. I kinda cheered at that.