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August: Osage County
An intense look at the lives of the strong-willed daughters of the Weston family, whose paths have diverged until a family crisis brings them back to the Midwest house they grew up in, and to the dysfunctional mother who raised them.
2013 · Directed by John Wells · 121 min · Comedy · Drama · Screenplay in the scene database · 8 frames
Tagline
Misery loves family
Plot
The title designates time and location: an unusually hot August in a rural area outside Pawhuska, Oklahoma, 60 miles northwest of Tulsa. Beverly Weston, an alcoholic, once-noted poet, teacher and author, interviews and hires a young Cheyenne woman, Johnna, as a live-in cook and caregiver for his strong-willed and contentious wife Violet, who has oral cancer and an addiction to narcotics. Shortly after this, he disappears from the house, and Violet calls her sister and daughters for support. Her sister Mattie Fae arrives with her husband Charles "Charlie" Aiken. Violet's middle daughter Ivy is single and the only one living locally; Barbara, her oldest, who has inherited her mother's mean streak, arrives from Colorado with her husband Bill and 14-year-old daughter Jean. Barbara and Bill are separated, but they put up a united front for Violet.
After five days, the sheriff arrives with the news that Beverly took his boat out on the lake and has drowned. Youngest daughter Karen arrives with the latest in a string of boyfriends, Steve Huberbrecht, a sleazy Florida businessman whom she introduces as her fiancé. Mattie Fae and Charles's 37-year-old awkward son "Little Charles" misses the funeral because he overslept and is met at the bus station by his father. Charlie loves his son, whereas Mattie Fae constantly belittles him. Ivy confides to her sisters that she is in love with Little Charles, her cousin, who plans to move to New York, and that she cannot have children because she had a hysterectomy. She feels this is her only chance to finally marry.
The family sits down to dinner after the funeral; fueled by drugs, Violet insults and embarrasses each person at the table under the guise of "truth-telling", which results in Barbara pouncing on her in a fit of anger. Barbara has had enough of her mother's drug addiction, attacks her, knocks her to the ground, and confiscates her multitude of pills. Later, after Violet has had a chance to sober up, she has a tender moment with her daughters and shares a story that demonstrates how cruel her own mother was when she longed for a new pair of cowgirl boots when she was in her early teens. Instead of giving Violet the boots she wanted, her mother gave her a beautifully wrapped box on Christmas morning containing old, filthy men's work boots as a cruel prank.
Plot summary from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA.
Crew
- Screenplay: Tracy Letts
- Cinematography: Adriano Goldman
- Edited by: Stephen Mirrione
- Music: Gustavo Santaolalla
- Production design: David Gropman
- Produced by: Jean Doumanian, George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Steve Traxler
Cast
- Meryl Streep as Violet Weston
- Julia Roberts as Barbara Weston
- Julianne Nicholson as Ivy Weston
- Juliette Lewis as Karen Weston
- Ewan McGregor as Bill Fordham
- Margo Martindale as Mattie Fae Aiken
- Abigail Breslin as Jean Fordham
- Chris Cooper as Charlie Aiken
- Dermot Mulroney as Steve Huberbrecht
- Benedict Cumberbatch as Little Charles Aiken
Production
- Country: United States of America
- Language: English
- Studios: Jean Doumanian Productions, Smokehouse Pictures, Battle Mountain Films, Yucaipa Films
- Budget: $25,000,000
- Box office: $74,188,937
- Themes: suicide, funeral, southern usa, drug addiction, oklahoma, based on play or musical, family secrets, dysfunctional family, cancer, suicide of father
More by John Wells
On this film
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