Movie Review - August: Osage County

Once in a blue moon I go see a movie with a friend, because they really want to. This tends to break the No-chick-flick-or-musicals mantra and I hold my breath and just jump in. It's only two hours, how bad can it be?

Let's define "bad", shall we?  I am NOT saying the acting was subpar, the dialog was lame or the sets were ho hum.  Not at all. But if you sat thru "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf" (which I lasted 10 minutes) then you pretty much can skip this.  The storyline is about a midwestern family coming together for a funeral.  No no, do not attempt to dodge the prickly possibilities with images of "The Big Chill" - there's no warmth in the face of death. No coming together to overcome one's familial skeletons, not for this bunch.  Meryl Streep should have received at least an Oscar nod for her scathingly domineering role as the matriarch of this crumbling family.  She enters the movie early on in a mix of prescription daze euphoria and relentless skewering of her family and she never lets up.  Various members of the family rise to her bait, in self defense or defense of others, and are systematically beheaded and jeered at.  Toward the end she replays a childhood memory of her mother's similar cruelty so we can at least say "oh, that's how she became that way" but by then we, just like her family, don't really care.  As her family flees for respite one by one, so too did I as soon as the credits started.  As someone once said to me "there is no talent in being cruel". This was not a "dark comedy" as described. This was just the ugly side of darkness, period.