Powerful drama-around-the-family-table with dream cast and five producers standing behind it.
Tracy Letts theatre play must have been sensation on the stage and acting in it cathartic for actors involved - now its successfully translated into big screen and boy, is it a strong movie or what. Huge amount of energy and talents are amassed here and most surprisingly is how everybody in this huge cast gets his chance to shine, it is really hard to imagine anyone else in this roles now, its almost as someone dreamed "hey, if we make a movie out if this, who would you like to have in it?"
Meryl Streep is a matriarch from Hell who drives her gentle, soft-spoken poet husband (Sam Shepard) into suicide and in the aftermath of his funeral the family is assembled around the family table, where all the Hell breaks loose. In a heart-wrenching sequence after sequence we follow as parental cruelty creates more unhappiness and cruelty in a vicious circle that never ends and only continues to grow like cancer in Streep's character mouth. Just like Violet (Meryl Streep) herself once suffered at the hands of her own mother, now she is the one who tortures everybody around her and her nastiness spreads around like some infectious disease , affecting not only the youngest, third generation but even innocent bystanders. Even when Violet doesn't spit insults from her cancerous mouth, just her presence and Medusa-look is enough to affect everybody present.
Just as she probably emotionally blackmailed her late husband to the point he could not take it anymore, Violet now manipulates and pulls the strings above her three daughters and its fascinating to watch energy between them. There is the strongest Barbara who has all the predispositions to became her mother (Julia Roberts), soft and self sacrificing old maid Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and a family bimbo (Juliette Lewis) who is basically constantly overlooked,hushed or screamed at. The rest of the family - aunts, husbands, boyfriends and children - are not just a background but all deeply involved with their own dramas. At the end the only single person who has not had meltdown is quiet, recently employed Native Indian (Misty Upham) stunned in her shock of what is going on around her.
As expected, Meryl Streep is nothing less than brilliant, though in this role she comes very close to latter-day Bette Davis. We watch her in horror as she gleefully throws arrows around her in painkillers-induced drug stupor, just to watch even bigger horror her sudden look that wordlessly express she knew everything all along and not a single family secret has ever escaped her. The most fascinating thing about this movie is how it suggests that Meryl Streep is passing her crown to (gasp) Julia Roberts who more than holds her own, in fact Roberts shows such a huge range of emotions here that it caught me completely by surprise - never in a million years I suspected she has it in her and years (nah, decades) in blockbusters behind her only bored me so far. Now I must re-think this.
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