Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) goes missing, and then is found dead. The death appears to be a suicide. His three adult daughters, Ivy, Barbara, and Karen (played by Julianne Nicholson, Julia Roberts, and Juliette Lewis, respectively) arrive home at different times and accompanied by different people. Ivy lives nearby, is single, and is there through the whole thing. Barbara comes as soon as she hears their father is missing with her husband, Bill (Ewan McGregor), who she is currently separated from, and her teenage daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin). Karen comes for the funeral with her fiancé, Steve (Dermot Mulroney). Also in the mix are the girls' mother, Violet (Meryl Streep), who pops a wide variety of painkillers like they are candy; Violet's sister, Mattie Fay (Margo Martindale); Mattie Fay's husband, Charlie (Chris Cooper); Mattie Fay's son, Little Charlie (Benedict Cumberbatch); and Johnna (Misty Upham), who Beverly hired to take care of Violet (who has cancer) shortly before he disappeared. It is August in Osage County, Oklahoma; the temperature on the bank clock reads 108 degrees, Violet keeps it nearly as hot in her house, and tensions are high.
It's...not fun to watch. Violet is almost always at least slightly high on painkillers, and sometimes completely incoherent. Everyone looks like hell: Julia Roberts has grey roots showing, and she and Ivy both dress in baggy, shapeless clothes. You can practically feel the heat; everything is dusty, dry, and terrible. Everyone keeps shouting at each other to reveal The Worst Secrets in the World. Dermot Mulroney is kind of the comic relief, and he winds up giving pot to fourteen-year-old Jean and then trying to feel her up. It's that kind of movie. Even in the most normal of families, the heartache of losing a loved one coupled with the unbearable heat and the stress of having so many people under one roof would make tensions run high...but this is not a normal family, and their problems are too big to be relatable. Meryl Streep's character is Just Awful, and the only time you feel even a little bit of sympathy for her is when she tells a horrible, horrible story about her horrible mother doing something horrible to her on Christmas when she was a kid. It's just...yeah. The performances are good, but it's all incredibly uncomfortable, and I'm not sure what the takeaway was. I can't necessarily recommend it.
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