August: Osage County

Your god can't save you now

Grade: F

Director: John Wells

Starring: Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney, Julianne Nicholson, Abigail Breslin, Juliette Lewis and Benedict Cumberbatch

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hr. 1 min.

The actors don’t just chew the scenery in August: Osage County—they engorge it. For two excruciating hours, otherwise talented performers are untethered from any directorial moorings, running with sharp dialogue and other dangerous devices. The actors run this asylum, but it’s the audience who feels like their undergoing a lobotomy.

Adapted with little medium modulation from the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts, August: Osage County lures an abnormal family back to their Oklahoma homestead in the wake of the disappearance of Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard), its patriarch—we’ll call him “the lucky one.” Violet (Meryl Streep), Beverly’s crass, boozy, pill-popping wife, is “consoled” by her sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and daughters Barbara (Julia Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Karen (Juliette Lewis). The women’s dimwitted menfolk are along for the ride, including Chris Cooper, Dermot Mulroney and Benedict Cumberbatch as a slack-jawed kissin' cousin.

This family gathering assumes the form of a bilious orgy of shrill insults and stunning dysfunction, all compressed into a single hellish weekend. Indeed, just one of the caustic exchanges would be enough to send all but the most masochistic relatives packing. Instead, they stick around for revelations of incest, infidelity and pedophila, laced with a torrent of barbs aimed at everything from clothing to hairstyles to being vegan. The situations are not only uncomfortable but also contrived.

Among the lot of regrettable performances, Streep’s is singularly risible. Her Violet is a midwestern melange of Norma Desmond and Joan Rivers, with an accent stuck somewhere between Tulsa and Tuscaloosa. Only Roberts and Nicholson manage to save any shred of dignity, but the former is constantly undercut by ludicrous prose and predicaments, while the latter is spared by simply having the good sense to drive away from this madhouse.

At one point, Violet’s stoic Native American caregiver (Misty Upham) takes a shovel to the head of a lecherous character. If only she’d kept swinging at the rest of this calamitous clan, this story would have a happy ending.

Remember Me

If you're a good actor, then I'm James Bond

Grade: D +

Director: Allen Coulter

Starring: Robert Pattinson, Emile de Ravin, Pierce Brosnan, and Chris Cooper

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Remember Me ought to be titled Remember James Dean. In this dour effort to prove Robert Pattinson can act, nomadic TV director Allen Coulter concocts a post-modern rip-off of Rebel Without a Cause, starring Pattinson doing his best/worst Dean impersonation to play Tyler Hawkins, an emotionally troubled rich-kid with daddy issues who subsists on a diet of beer and cigarettes and sporadically attends NYU when not part-timing at the local bookstore.

The film opens in 1991 when young Ally Craig (Lost’s Emilie de Ravin) watches her mother get gunned down on a New York City subway platform by a street hoodlum. Ten years later (note the time…note the place), Ally lives at home, attends college, and enjoys an uneasy relationship with her cop father, Neil (Chris Cooper, struggling with his New Yawk accent).

After Neil arrests and roughs-up Tyler, he decides to date his daughter as some half-witted measure of revenge. Naturally, before long Tyler is cooking Ally dinner, Ally is wearing Tyler’s sweats, and the two are splashing each other with water and exchanging inane bon mots: “I have a coaster if you’d like a coaster.” “Sorry, I don’t do coasters until the third date.”

We have no idea why Tyler’s business mogul father (Pierce Brosnan) is so estranged from his children or his ex-wife. Or why Tyler’s kid sister (Ruby Jerins) is bullied by the girls in school. Or why his sister getting her hair shorn by those mean girls proves the miraculous balm that heals every deep-seated dysfunction afflicting these annoying, self-absorbed cretins. Or why Pattinson and de Ravin are unable to exude even a modicum of acting acumen or romantic chemistry.

But, nothing explains the risible plot twist – one of the most tasteless since The Boy in The Striped Pajamas – that manages to run roughshod over a storyline that means so little to begin with. Remember Me? I’d rather not.

Neil Morris