Wells: August: Osage County (2013)

At one level, the film version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer-Prize winning play feels like exactly what it is: a four-hour magnum opus cut down to two hours. That removes any pretension to realism that the play might have had, as well as creating vast lapses in continuity that add quite a ludicrous touch to this epic disintegration of an Oklahoma farming family, headed by Violet Weston (Meryl Street). At the same time, though, this truncated version opens up a melodramatic possibility and intensity that’s more dispersed in the original play, giving Meryl Streep the opportunity for a no-holds-barred melodramatic masterpiece. And, as might be expected, she delivers, putting in one of her most sublime, ridiculous performances, not least because Violet is high for pretty much the whole film, until, somewhere between the decline of a matriarch and the decline of a drug addict, Streep falls into the role all melodramatic heroines end up playing: survival. Acting as if she has to outlive the film and everyone in it, she obliterates virtually every other actor, with the possible exception of Julia Roberts, who plays her headstrong daughter Barb, and slots right back into melodrama as if she’d only starred in Steel Magnolias yesterday. That might offend fans of the original play, since it’s only a matter of time until Streep’s performance obliterates the play itself, folding it into an interminable melodramatic monologue that leaves nothing but her own performance. But that’s also the obliterative nature of Violet’s character, so there’s something appropriate about the way she turns the director and audience into just one more family she’s managed to outwit, contain and transcend, attracting all the oxygen in the room to her fabulous flame. Early in the film, as she’s approaching the family home – and Violet - Barb comments on the Great Plains as a state of mind, “a spiritual affliction, like the blues." And in this version, there’s no doubt that Violet’s responsible for those Plains – like Streep herself, she’s a scorched earth actress, decimating and levelling everything in her way.