August, Osage County review

August, Osage County

Director John Wells

Stars Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Dermot Mulroney, Abigail Breslin, Chris Cooper, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ewan McGregor, Juliette Lewis, Julianne Nicholson, Sam Shepard

Running time 130 mins

Plot: Oklahoma poet Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) is struggling under the pressure of dealing with his acid-tongued wife Violet (Meryl Streep), whose cancer medication is causing her to behave even more erratically than usual. Beverly hires a housekeeper and promptly disappears, forcing reluctant daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest of three, to return home.

Sam Shepard's character has the right idea; spending more than two hours with these ghastly people would be enough to send anyone running to the hills. Based on the play of the same name by Tracy Letts, whose other stage work – Killer Joe and Bug – has translated quite well to the big screen in the past, this bloated and depressing black comedy (of sorts) is possibly the biggest waste of megastar talent since Joseph Losey's Boom! reunited Richard Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor in 1968. It would be nice to say it has similar camp value, but August, Osage County, as its opaque and ponderous title suggests it might, is simply boring, droning on and on until the finish line, taking the entire dreadful Weston family – and us – to the brink of self-destruction.

It's easy to see what gathered so many fantastic actors here. This is the stuff of Great American Drama, and its premise bears more than a passing resemblance to Tennessee Williams's seminal work Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, albeit with quite a lot of gender reversal. The script must have been a doozy to read, since not only are there so many juicy parts, there's also much to say – it's practically a gift book of audition monologues. And on top of it all, there's Meryl Streep – MERYL STREEP! – as the wicked-witch matriarch around whom this whole grim roundelay revolves.

To say that Streep is very good in the movie goes without saying. But what's it all in aid of? Like everyone else here, with the possible exception of Ewan McGregor as Barbara's estranged husband, her performance is highly theatrical, to the extent that subtlety is an early casualty and sympathy goes straight out the window. Each of these players appears to be in a different movie, with Juliette Lewis – middle sister Karen – unleashing her inner Blanche Dubois with such force that one wonders if she seriously thinks Elia Kazan might be watching. Roberts, meanwhile, is tough to categorise. While she copes admirably with a difficult role, one can always see the gears moving. Every speech, every gesture, comes with an unbearable sobriety, all the more galling given that the film starts with an argument about Beverly's alcoholism.

Director John Wells has form when it comes to this; his 2010 feature debut The Company Men remains a masterclass in po-faced sincerity, detailing the lives of three high-flying business executives who face such traumas as losing their golf-club membership in the wake of redundancy. The Company Men starred Ben Affleck, Chris Cooper and Tommy Lee Jones, and showed a similar trust in famous and experienced names. But movie stars need directing too, and here it seems they're just left to their own devices, bouncing all over the place like Oscar-nominated Pokémon. If it were in the service of a good story, it might pay off, but August, Osage County is just a high-end slice of misery porn with nothing to cling to but the certainty that the only vaguely likeable characters – Barbara's sweet kid sister Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and her wimpy boyfriend (Benedict Cumberbatch) – will be dumped on worst of all.