Stay away from Osage County in August....

Osage was the name of the little town next to Morgantown, WV, where I went to college. It was a blue collar place and the Town and Gown stuff went off the tracks when students from the University thought a little slumming in Osage might be fun. Fun it was not.

Osage is also the name of a county in Oklahoma (fictional or otherwise, I didn't look it up) for the movie, "August: Osage County". Having a colon in the title should have been a give-away. Such a harsh punctuation, ripping apart what came before from what comes after but keeping both in the same sentence.

It was a wondrous movie, but not for the faint of heart or those who believe 'family' is a holy thing.

The funniest thing for me (and it is screamingly funny in parts--the kind of humor you use to discuss a particularly unfortunate episode in the proctologist's office) was the two proper little ladies behind me who were horrified by the language coming from the mouths of Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. "Did she really say that?" was a question they asked each other over and again between audibly gasping (I kid you not) at the stuff you couldn't really wonder if they  had said.

It was amazing to me to see two such consummate actresses work so hard to out awful themselves. The folks in the movie, all wonderful talents, would actually require a term far beyond 'disfunctional family' to describe them. The cursing and incredible disrespect for each other is one thing--the breaking of things and the physical confrontations are quite another.

At least Julia Roberts' character does love one of her sisters and her 14 year old. Meryl loves no one, not even herself, which may be the dramatic problem.

Well worth seeing for lots of reasons (astonishing cinematography among other things) but don't expect to come out of it whistling the sound track...or whistling at all....The pain of these characters is global in so many ways that I left full of gratefulness for my experiences with 'family'--even at the worse in my life--made all my family seem like Ozzie and Harriet moments compared to this painfully flawed group of Okies....