We viewed a film on Saturday night that I was at first reluctant about, but soon fell under its influence as a human relations tragedy, dispelling my initial doubts about its watchability. For one thing, I have an adverse reaction to Meryl Streep; I just happen to dislike the woman's physical characteristics and emoting and what to me, appears her histrionics as an actor. It's, I suppose, her thespian intensity, and I've no doubt she doesn't strike everyone in the way she does me.

I do happen to like Julia Roberts, and seeing Benedict Cumberbatch in any role always seems a treat.

In this film: August: Osage County, all of the actors outdo themselves in the intensities of their portrayals as part of a dysfunctional family, in a tragedy of human emotions outdoing themselves to create for them all an inferior quality of life. That is so given the weight in emotions that familial strings impose upon us all.



No self-flagellating North American film exploring the subconscious faults of a community could ever bypass the irresistible thorns of highlighting racial bigotry, and on that Continent, the white majority scorn for the indigenous people whom they regret wronging and hold in contempt at one and the same time, pricks the conscience.

As it turns out, the sole representative of North American nativism is the single individual whose compassion for others, and whose conscious conscience and forgivingness shows her as a whole spirit whom all the others would do well to emulate. Her appearance and role, a side issue, nonetheless gives depth to the entire panoply of faulty human interaction.

As for the others, lost souls all, their self-destructively mean compulsions and impulses do grave harm to their emotional relationships with their most significant intimate others, reaching into the network of the extended family. The main characters, mother and eldest daughter, are a classic battling duo of personalities, the younger's inherited from the older's. Their vitriolic bitterness, both inherited and adopted through circumstances, destroy the peace and comfort their lives could contain, leaving them poisonously acerbic to those they truly love, with predictable results.



Perhaps the story line is too trite and moralistic, but it does reflect what happens in too many families in an unforgiving interplay of blame, resentment and manipulation. And nor does it bypass an accurate look at generational and moral turpitude to add to the already stifling aura of nastiness.

An instructional film to a degree, and hardly what one might construe as entertaining.

All of the actors playing their character roles produced an outstanding performance.