Friday, January 24, 2014

August:Osage County

“Now don’t go all Carson McCullers on me,” Barbara Watson (Julia Roberts) admonishes, but that’s just what Tracy Letts does in the play and consequent screenplay for August: Osage County. The over-the-top Southern Gothic characters with their florid, acrid relationships seep out into the Oklahoma plains — and beyond, until this tragically fractured family characterizes contemporary America as a whole.
This darkly dysfunctional family has been ruined by a long line of mean mothers. The characters expected to provide warmth, love, understanding, forgiveness, are instead a succession of cold, selfish harridans that make the family relationships feel  — as the wiser Ivy (Julianne Nichoison) remarks — like a random array of molecules. This nuclear family implodes. Its every branch is torn apart, defined by mutual alienation not connection. This family tears the Hallmark veil off the Republicans’ “family values” and exposes the nation as amoral, selfish, greedy, vicious, unforgiving and yet for all that — self-righteous. 
When Karen (Juliet Lewis) admires her parents for staying married for so long, she has to be reminded her father just killed himself — because of his wife’s self-absorption. Karen — now willfully blind — preserves her engagement to her  fiancĂ© (Ewan Macgregor), however soured her Belize honeymoon, after he has been caught trying to seduce her 14-year-old niece with pot.
Matriarch Violet’s (Meryl Streep) recollection of her mother’s response to her wish for new cowgirl boots epitomizes the generation that takes pleasure in denying the next generation its dreams. Coquettishly the iron-fisted Violet says the unjacketed men make the funeral dinner look “like a cockfight.” As if she has left any of the men any manhood. As she says, “Nothing slips by me.” But no-one close emerges unscathed.
If the men are more sympathetic it’s because they are weaker. Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch) will carry that diminution to his grave, as even his romantic escape is doomed by the family’s past. Even the relatively sensitive Charles (Chris Cooper) can’t resist embarrassing the young vegetarian. He finally stands up to his wife’s abuse of their son, unaware that he’s not his son. His eulogy to Beverly (Sam Shepard) is similarly based on his own blindness. Shepard’s brief appearance leaves echoes of warmth and decency but we later learn of his remoteness and irresponsibility. As the family father, intellect and grey eminence he’s the Thomas Jefferson figure, for his own primal sin will paralyze his descendants across the generations.
It’s August so the rooms swelter and the plains burn gold. It’s the end of summer, edging into the winter of discontent. In that this family — and its country — helplessly roil.       

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