“I haven’t seen Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play ‘August: Osage County,’ ” David Denby writes in last week’s issue, “but people whose judgment I trust say that the piece worked powerfully in the theatre—which is, perhaps, where it should have remained.” As someone who saw the play twice on Broadway—six happy hours that might have easily become nine or twelve—and recommended it to anyone within earshot, I feel compelled to defend the play (and that Pulitzer) to moviegoers who are probably thinking, Huh?
When “August” opened at the Imperial Theatre, in late 2007, it caused the kind of sensation rarely achieved by a three-hour-long ensemble drama with nary a film star on its marquee. Coming from Steppenwolf with its Chicago cast mostly intact, the play was an ambitious, turbulent study of an Oklahoma family whose dysfunctions seemed to pile up ad infinitum: pill addiction, alcoholism, suicide, infidelity, incest, and, above all, a talent for cruelty. In this wreck of a family, Letts found a metaphor for crumbling American promise. “Life is very long,” the patriarch, Beverly Weston, says in the first scene, quoting T. S. Eliot. He’s the embodiment of weary apocalypse, and then he kills himself.
Though it had its detractors, “August” received so much acclaim that it started to suffer from The Great American Play syndrome: audiences expecting Eugene O’Neill forgot to notice how funny the play was. (Sample dialogue: “I just can’t believe your world view is that dark.” “You live in Florida.”) Letts, whose plays include “Bug” and “Killer Joe,” is an actor as well as a playwright: he won a Tony last year for playing George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” and you may know him as “Homeland” ’s Senator Lockhart. Actors love Letts’s plays because he writes for them. Part of what made the theatrical experience of “August” so potent was the feeling that the Steppenwolf actors, under the direction of Anna D. Shapiro, had developed a sixth sense for each other, the kind that usually exists only among relatives. The individual performances—Deanna Dunagan’s vampiric Violet, Amy Morton’s bone-weary Barbara, and Rondi Reed’s bullying Mattie Fae—had a nearly genetic symbiosis. The production was more than the sum of its star turns.
The expediency of film shoots precludes that kind of intimacy, so it’s the director’s job to keep everyone on the same stylistic wavelength. But John Wells, who had a dozen movie stars to juggle, allows his cast to drift in various directions. As mother and daughter, Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts both give full-bodied performances, but they’re not quite in the same movie, much less the same family. It’s hard to single out any one actor who’s miscast or out of place (Juliette Lewis and Chris Cooper are particularly fine), but together they don’t have the wallop of a great ensemble.
The bigger challenge in bringing “August” to film is its scale. Countless works that thrive from compression onstage become claustrophobic onscreen (compare “Doubt” and “God of Carnage”), even when directors try to aerate them with exterior scenes. Wells (and Letts, who wrote the screenplay) inserted a few—notably, Roberts chasing Streep through an open field—but the film never weds the action to the Oklahoma landscape in the way that, say, Alexander Payne does when he captures the flat isolation of the Plains in “Nebraska.” It’s not just that the action is confined to the house: it’s that the house, in the stage version, was more than just a house. Todd Rosenthal’s dollhouse-like set was a universe in miniature, at once confining and encyclopedic. It seemed like the only place in the world.
All of which makes the fuss over the film’s last scene unsurprising. The play ends with Violet, finally abandoned by her children, weeping in the attic in the arms of her stoic Native American caretaker. (The indigenous-servant-as-silent-witness trope is one of the play’s more heavy-handed flaws.) When the film premièred, at the Toronto International Film Festival, a new final scene had been added: Roberts on the open road, driving toward an uncertain future. Wells said that test audiences had “rebelled” against the original ending because they wanted to know what happened to Roberts’s character. The new ending wasn’t “happy,” just ambiguously redemptive, but it seemed to betray the play’s bleak finale—an emotional wasteland worthy of T. S. Eliot. Despite all the chatter, the car scene stayed in the picture, as it should have. In a movie, when the main character leaves the house you don’t expect never to see her again. Nevertheless, the quibbling over the ending seemed to exemplify the hurdles of adapting “August”: the characters’ emotions are drawn too big for a real, live house. A. O. Scott, in his pan, described the film as a “thespian cage match.” If Charles Isherwood had used that phrase in the theatre review, it would have constituted a rave.
Perhaps a surer director could have balanced the play’s histrionics with its undertow of irony—the way it weaves in and around the conventions of melodrama, just as Letts’s “Bug” upended the thriller. Or perhaps the story’s power lies in the symbolic suggestiveness of the stage. As much as I enjoyed the movie, I was probably experiencing sense memory: each zinger carried the echo of theatrical bliss.
