Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.
I think, if you ask just about anyone, he or she will complain a little (or a lot) about his or her family. It’s a natural thing to do. When you run across a film like August: Osage County, you have one of two reactions. It’s entirely possible that you see a film like this and sympathize with it completely; it ends up fitting you like an environment. The other possibility, and the reaction that I thankfully had to it, is a realization that the issues of your own family are almost nothing compared with what they could be. The Weston family is dysfunctional just to the edge of believability. It’s worth noting that one of the more interesting dysfunctional families on television in the last decade or so (from Burn Notice) was surnamed “Westen.” That seems like a bizarre trend.
Anyway, August: Osage County is the king-hell story of family dysfunction. There isn’t a moment of this that isn’t about psychological suffered by one person in the extended Weston family at the hands of another member of the extended Weston family. It begins with family patriarch Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) hiring a local named Johnna (Misty Upham) as a cook and as someone to look after his wife, Violet (Meryl Streep). Violet has been diagnosed with cancer and is a brutal, acerbic woman who, thanks to her diagnosis, is hooked on a variety of medications (and not for the first time). Beverly, himself a once-acclaimed poet, is a drunk and is unabashed about it.
