NPR More Funniest Driveway Moments by National Public Radio

Every member of this cast is a walking, talking open wound.Įldest daughter Barbara (Julia Roberts) is separated from her philandering husband Bill (Ewan MacGregor), and can't relate to her teenage daughter Jean (Abigail Breslin). Interestingly, the writer doesn't bother making these screen ventures hugely distinct from their stage inspirations their staginess works, though, because his characters seem trapped within their own dire lives just as much as if they were locked within the limited space of a theater.Īnd theatricality makes a kind of sense, really these are lives lived without any letup from the heightened drama. Letts reworked his own play for the screen, as he also has done in recent years for adaptations of his plays Bug and Killer Joe, and the dialogue - harsh, blackly comic, filled with exchanges of sulfuric intensity - is of a piece with those works. And with everyone under one roof, years of family dysfunction come to bloom at the end of her cruel, pill-addled tongue. His wife, Violet (Meryl Streep), suffering from oral cancer and perpetually high on a laundry list of sedatives and painkillers, calls on her sister and her three daughters, along with their various significant others, to come to her aid during the developing crisis.

The impetus for the gathering is the disappearance of Beverly (Sam Shepard), patriarch, poet and alcoholic. In this story of an uncomfortable family reunion, time is marked by cars pulling out of their dusty Oklahoma driveway at regular intervals, never to be seen again. They don't want to be part of it, either. In fact, that's what many characters in the movie - an adaptation of Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning play - decide for themselves.

That's the sense you get watching August: Osage County - that you're peering in on moments so intimate and painful that no one should witness them, perhaps not even those who are a part of it.

NPR More Funniest Driveway Moments by National Public Radio