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Created Jan 20, 2014 11:50PM PST • Edited Nov 28, 2019 09:36AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Good 3.0

   Unhappy families are each unhappy in their own way, wrote Tolstoy. The Oklahoma family in August: Osage County is unhappy because their matriarch is a pill popping shrew. This monstrous maternal presence is masterfully played by the incomparable Meryl Streep. She’s vividly entertaining, albeit more the instigator of a forced march than the centerpiece of an insightful family drama. The result is a fitfully entertaining slog of a movie, notwithstanding its prize-winning pedigree and formidable cast.

   This cinematic production of a celebrated play has three flaws. Julia Roberts is a shallow foil as Meryl Streep’s eldest daughter, never mind that her performance has been nominated for an Academy Award. Second, while the movie doesn’t feel stagy, neither does its drama cohere as if on stage. Finally, some actions don’t ring true, from the characters themselves and from the circumstantial reality they inhabit.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Meryl Streep slays as a terminal asshole: cancerous and vindictive. Dame Streep draws out a thought well. Sam Shepard weighs heavily as her alcoholic husband of many a decade, onetime a great poet.

   Julia Roberts plays her Number 1 Daughter, shrilly and with little depth, though she F-bombs with aplomb.

   • Ewan McGregor is the fellow professor she’s been married to for a couple of decades.
   • Abigail Breslin is their troublesome teenage daughter.

   Margo Martindale plays Meryl Streep’s obnoxious sister, the two of them sharing a Dickensian childhood which they use as a license to ill everyone in their orbit, especially family. Husbands, children, maids: Everybody comes in for the lash.

   • Chris Cooper is Martindale’s good guy of a husband.
   • Benedict Cumberbatch – a Brit – plays their Oklahoman son. That’s acting.

   Julianne Nicholson plays the daughter who stayed home in Oklahoma to look after Dad & Mom, the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf of the Plains.

   Juliette Lewis plays the sexy sister, ditzily but disappointingly. Anyway, she’s the one who moved to Miami, returning to her girlhood home in Oklahoma for a funeral in a Ferrari driven by Dermot Mulroney.

   Misty Upham classes up the production as the Native American woman who looks after all the crazy European-Americans.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

   Meryl Streep is Perfect. Julia Roberts is Very Good

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Good 3.0

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Good 3.0

    Tracy Letts’ play, one of the most lauded from the past decade, is nearly Southern Gothic in its grotesque familial dysfunctions. Consider this film version a case study of the chasm between stage and screen.

11. Direction OK 2.5

12. Play Good 3.0

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Good 3.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.8

    Rudeness of 3.7 outweighs the 2.5 on Sex and 2.3 on Violence, making this a trash talking Sordid affair.

17. Sex Titillating 2.5

18. Violence Fierce 2.3

19. Rudeness Nasty 3.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

    The Glam Queen sister didn’t drive from Miami to Oklahoma in a Ferrari with her fiancé. That’s 22 hours of driving, per Google Maps. One way. Even if the Ferrari could theoretically do it in under 20, 18 even, that’s still more of a drive – in August – than any Ferrari owner is making, with his fiancé. Just saying.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.6

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0