Curiously, the major reviews for “August: Osage County,” the John Wells movie, have been turning into a referendum — a spectacularly ill-informed referendum, to boot — on “August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Tracy Letts play that premiered at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company.
This is ridiculous.
By their own admission, neither A.O. Scott, the esteemed film critic for the New York Times, nor Kenneth Turan, the fine movie critic for the Los Angeles Times, saw Anna D. Shapiro’s original production of the play, first performed at the Steppenwolf, then on Broadway (where it ran for 18 months), then at the National Theatre in London and at the Sydney Theatre Company, and also on a national tour, which played Los Angeles.
There has been some social-media grumbling among theater lovers about the illogical compartmentalization of arts-reviewing beats and observations about how, in the glory days of an Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill, these things were not so divided. A serious movie lover would have seen such a play as a matter of course (as did Michael Phillips of this newspaper). I see that point but there is a lot more to keep track of now, culturally speaking. Rare is the arts, literary or dining critic who has not reviewed something with sadly limited knowledge of the source. In my particular glass house, I could not throw any such stone. My issue here is that a play not working as a film does not tell you a hill of beans about its efficacy or even its lasting value as a theatrical work.
Turan, though, began his harshly negative review of “August: Osage County” thus: “‘I’m just truth telling,’ says Meryl Streep’s Violet, the gorgon mother at the center of ‘August: Osage County,’ and in that same spirit I have to confess that (a) I never saw this Pulitzer Prize-winning vehicle by Tracy Letts when it was on stage and (b) nothing about this film version makes me regret that choice.”
That’s just not a logical deduction. Examples of why are legion. To name just one, Mel Brooks’ musical version of “The Producers” was a fantastic piece of theater but it made a lousy movie.
Scott was a tad more circumspect in his admission, avoiding contradicting his theater-reviewing peers and acknowledging that the main problem here may be a mishandled movie. “But it also may be that the awkward transition from stage to screen has exposed weak spots in Mr. Letts’s dramatic architecture and bald spots in his writing,” Scott went on, implying that one mark of a great work for the theater is an ability to translate seamlessly to the screen.
Scott is a superb critic. But again, I respectfully disagree with the logic. Fine dramatic architecture does not require transferability to the screen. A camera does not shed a scorching light on the “bald spots” of theatrical writing. The two media are fundamentally different. Can you imagine such a statement being made about a drama by Samuel Beckett? Or just ponder any number of the brilliant novels that work gorgeously on the page, but were lousy as films.
I was, of course, a very early, and perhaps overly animated, admirer of this play, which I regard as the script behind one of the best theatrical shows ever seen in Chicago, and, thereafter, a true highpoint of its Broadway season, so the reader may detect a certain defensiveness in the face of the attacks on the writing in the face of the movie. So stipulated. I’d also acknowledge that there were always two schools of thought on “August,” the play. Some of us thought it a great American drama, worthy of comparison to the aforementioned greats, no apology needed. Some thought it an effective potboiler (Lillian Hellman was a popular comparative). What side you landed on depended, I think, on your affinity (or lack thereof) for Letts’ self-consciously theatrical and satirical dramatic style and his singular ability to view a dysfunctional family through that prism.
Was this a weighty and worthy updating of the great American family drama for a new era, replete with broader ramifications and nationalistic themes? Well, that was my view, and I’d note as evidence that plenty of great American playwrights were first seen as excessive or insouciant. Or was it a parody or “campification,” so to speak, of the great American family tragedy, a fun romp and an occasion for raw, juicy Midwestern theatrics for the coastal sophisticates to enjoy, from a distance?
Take your pick (and I ain’t changing sides). But the movie really has little to do with it, either way. It’s certainly not fair to say “look, lousy movie. See? That proves it never was that good a play.”
For the record, Wells’ movie is, with some exceptional moments, disappointing to me. The film has numerous faults, most problematic of which is the simple lack of dramatic build therein. One senses the way the film was spliced together from the rise and fall of individual scenes. Not all of them are individually weak (although a few are), but, when coupled with the curiously incongruous underscoring and the wholesale lack of irony, the result of this lack of real-time sensation is a complete absence of the unstoppable rush of revelation that unspooled from the Steppenwolf stage. Opening up the script to include conversations in cars and the like was the logical thing for Letts to do, but also, it seems, a choice that came at a cost.
The movie is full of what feels like artificially preselected reaction shots; on stage one did not know where to look, so interesting were all the traumatized faces. The movie mostly misses one of the play’s key themes — the incongruity of this dysfunctional academic family living their lives on a land to which they have no viable connection whatsoever. It also is populated by accomplished actors who do not, for a single moment, feel like they belong to the same ensemble, and, thus, by extension, the same fictional family.
As excellent as Streep and Julia Roberts are in places, their work in the film kept making me think that the original Steppenwolf cast made this a much harder movie to make because the thrilling intensity of their acting made these roles so attractive to the Hollywood A list and their agents as to inevitably disconnect these characters from the reality that grounded them. They were seen as opportunities more than people. Streep adds far more nuance to the role of Violet than I ever saw on stage, but the crafted detail of Streep’s acting turns out to be, weirdly enough, an impediment to Letts’ particularly theatrical brand of storytelling. Or so it seems when you watch this particular movie.
From the moment those Hollywood stars started attending the Imperial Theatre, none of the original cast ever thought they would have a chance at getting the movie. Nor did Shapiro. That’s not the way the business works. No one would have come. Too much money at risk. The art would have been served by rethinking that paradigm. The Steppenwolf cast (and Shapiro, who understands them and Letts’ style uncommonly well) surely would have made this a better movie, not least because they would have done less. They would not have been seizing a rare opportunity so much as continuing a long journey down the rabbit hole. But we’ll never know.
And, heck, we still have the play. A really great play for the theater, a piece that allowed a group of not-quite-famous actors who had worked together for years to meld with a thrilling script written for them. In the theater, this play was made to howl like a prairie dog.
Might a different director have managed that on screen? I don’t know. It’s a whole other question.
Twitter @ChrisJonesTrib
