Based on Tracey Letts’ 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning story comes a whole lot of drama (and that’s an understatement) under one Oklahoma family’s roof, out in the middle of nowhere.
They say nothing happens that isn’t supposed to happen, and in this story, it seems a lot is happening that might have been avoided…but try telling that to Violet (Meryl Streep) who gnaws into her role as the family matriarch, drugged and boozed up and wrestling with her mouthy comments, which is ironic since she’s suffering from mouth cancer. We don’t know where the ‘relaxers’ kick in and where they slack off….as is intended, and so she channels Mommy Dearest.
Yet despite this being Meryl’s tour-de-force performance and her Oscar-worthy film, the burden weighs heavily on her daughter, Barbara (Julia Roberts) who must tame family secrets when the group reunions after her father (Sam Shepard’s) passing. Starting with Barbara’s own problems, she has a husband (Ewan McGregor) with a wandering eye, and a 14 year old daughter (Abigail Breslin) who’s trying to make sense of adolescence as seen through her kooky relatives.
Other family members are Barbara’s Aunt Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and her son (Benedict Cumberbatch). There’s the other daughter – the younger sister (Juliette Lewis) – who arrives with her latest conquest – a real estate tycoon (Dermot Mulroney) in his radio-blasting Ferrari. The other sister (Julianne Nicholson) who might be considered ‘normal’ up until now, finally decides to run away from the chaos. She’s going to follow her ‘secret’ and her dreams to Manhattan.
Emotions run high at weddings and funerals and apparently when there’s 108 degree heat in the middle of Oklahoma. But emotions also run deep. Mistakes must be forgiven, pasts not forgotten, but eventually reckoned with. Clearly there’s more than what meets the eye as seen through a mature Julia Robert’s squinted one. Through her perception turned great performance Robert’s delivers the blurred lines of dysfunctional family, learning that hindsight is always 20/20.
John Wells – a master at everything he touches from television’s ‘West Wing’ to his film Company of Men – directs with a skilled hand in chaos (remember TV’s ‘ER?’). At times the story has elements of Steel Magnolias on hallucinogens. At other times it feels like a very well-done screen version of the play it was intended to be, but the acting is so flawless, so larger-than-life, it requires a big screen…and that’s just what Jean Doumanian intended when she produced this masterpiece.
Move over Gravity, Bullock floats all around outer space, while Streep contains it in one dining room under one roof. ♔ ♕ ♚ ♛