‘August: Osage County’ and What It Means to Be a “Strong” Woman in America

The strength of ‘Osage’ is that it never once sentimentalizes women’s relationships with one another. It does not allow for trite Hollywood portrayals of women as somehow less violent, less complex, or less serious than men. ‘August: Osage County’ is an odd sort of respite for those of us who don’t relate to stories of quirky, privileged, white girls from Brooklyn. The women of ‘Osage’ would destroy ‘Girls’ Hannah Horvath with a word and look. For me, it’s a kind of comfort to see these steely women on screen.

August: Osage County. Carloads of fun!
August: Osage County. Carloads of fun!
This article by Lisa Knisely was originally published on Bitch. Read more feminist film reviews at Bitch.

August: Osage County has garnered mostly lukewarm reviews. This is somewhat of a surprise: the movie is based on the Pulitzer-winning play by Tracy Letts and the film’s cast is packed with talented actors. Although both Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts were nominated for Golden Globes for their powerful performances, both of them walked away from the award ceremony last Sunday night empty-handed.

But then, this is a movie that is, unambiguously, about women. August: Osage County is about morally flawed, sometimes cruel, and often unlikable women.

And that’s what makes August: Osage County good.

At its essence, the film is about Julia Roberts’ character, Barbara Weston, and her struggle to both claim and reject her identity as a “strong woman.” She inherits her strength from her mother, Violet (Meryl Streep), and it’s a mixture of involuntary responsibility for others and a hardness necessary for survival. At one point midway through the film, Barbara and her two sisters (Julianne Nicholson and Juliette Lewis) sit together discussing their mother. Ivy, the reserved middle sister played by Nicholson, distances herself from affiliation with the rest of the Weston clan by claiming that family is simply a genetic accident of cells. Despite this bit of wishful thinking on Ivy’s part, we see clearly throughout the film that this is far from true. August: Osage County hammers home the idea that our upbringing shapes us no matter how much we may want to escape our complex relationships with our less-than-perfect mothers. The film is deeply evocative of how the familial, social, and physical landscapes of our childhoods leave indelible marks on our adult identities.

Film poster for August: Osage County
Film poster for August: Osage County

 

In his review for the L.A. Times, Kenneth Turan writes that the film “does nothing but disappoint,” comparing it to “that branch of reality TV where dysfunctional characters… make a public display of their wretched lives.” The problem with the film, according to Turan, is that its high melodrama doesn’t make the audience care about the characters, but instead makes the audience feel trapped.

But, this, I think, is the point. The experience of watching the film is stifling and emotionally difficult, much like the experience of growing up in a dysfunctional, addiction-fueled family like the one we see on the screen. If Turan feels like a voyeur looking in on the “wretched lives” of the Weston family, other viewers of the film will recognize, perhaps with too much familiarity, the uncanny mixture of very dark humor and gut-wrenching trauma at the heart of Weston family life. In the tradition of Faulkner and McCullers, this is a story that holds no punches.

Like Turan, New York Times’ critic A.O. Scott reviewed the film poorly, though he was slightly less negative in his review, writing that it lacked “fresh insight into family relations, human psychology or life on the Plains.” Randy Shulman also gave it an unfavorable review claiming, “The film has one electrifying scene, in which a husband (Chris Cooper) takes his bitchy, critical wife (Margo Martindale) to task. It’s a bracing moment that, for an instant, jolts us out of our lethargy. Had the entire film been on this level of engagement, August: Osage County might have been one of the year’s best films.”

Reading Shulman’s opinion struck me. That same moment in the film was my least favorite scene. I was, indeed, jolted by the scene that Shulman lauds, thinking it seemed too easy in its moral righteousness. It was at that moment of Osage that most of the men in the film (played by Chris Cooper, Sam Shepard, Ewan McGregor, and Benedict Cumberbatch) suddenly seemed to be the innocent and heroic victims of a pack of soul-devouring, child-eating, Gorgon harpies from the hilly plains of Oklahoma. This struck me as strangely out of tune with the rest of the film, which walked the line between making viewers simultaneously despise and sympathize with the women characters who forcefully drive its plot.

The strength of Osage is that it never once sentimentalizes women’s relationships with one another. It does not allow for trite Hollywood portrayals of women as somehow less violent, less complex, or less serious than men. August: Osage County is an odd sort of respite for those of us who don’t relate to stories of quirky, privileged, white girls from Brooklyn. The women of Osage would destroy Girls’ Hannah Horvath with a word and look. For me, it’s a kind of comfort to see these steely women on screen.

The women of August: Osage County looking mightly unlikable.
The women of August: Osage County looking mightly unlikable.

 

Despite its relative strengths, though, the film has one glaring failing: its treatment of race. Actress Misty Upham plays Johnna Monevata, a Native American woman hired at the start of the film to take care of the cancer-stricken, pill-addicted, racist Violet. That Violet is raw and unflinching in her racism against Native Americans isn’t the problem, as this seems realistically in accord with her character. What is an issue though is that the film’s attempt to deal with Native-White race relations in Oklahoma comes off hollow and under-developed. While she was a central figure in the original play, in the film, we never get to know Johnna beyond the fact that she can bake good pies.

While most of the narrative is so adept at portraying the mixture of intimacy and violence in the Weston household, the relationship between Johnna and the rest of the characters is flat. Toward the very end of the film, a disoriented and distraught Violet seeks solace and comfort from Johnna. This scene could have been a striking commentary on the way that people of color are often compelled within racist social structures to provide emotional labor and physical care for white people when their own kin will not. If this was the intended subtext of Johnna’s presence in the story, her character ultimately registers more like a problematic aside to the “real” action of the white characters in the film. This is really a missed opportunity for a film that is otherwise so successful at highlighting the complexities of being a strong woman from the Plains.

 


Dr. Lisa C. Knisely is a freelance writer and an Assistant Professor of the Liberal Arts in Portland, Ore.  

 

The Grifters; Yeuch

Written by Robin Hitchcock
The Grifters poster
The Grifters (1990) is a movie that’s been on my “to see” list for years. I knew it had epic critical acclaim at the time of its release. I’ve liked nearly every film I’ve seen by director Stephan Frears. I absolutely adore all three members of the main cast (Anjelica Huston, John Cusack, and Annette Bening). And it gets bonus points for having two women as central characters.
But when I finally caught The Grifters this week, it was a big disappointment. There are plenty of things to recommend about this film: It’s not quite like anything I’ve seen before even though it’s in the trope-heavy noir genre. There is some wonderful acting, with Anjelica Huston in particular delivering a riveting performance. Frears brings in some directorial flourishes worthy of the opening credit “A Martin Scorsese Production,” but others feel awkwardly dated, such as the disjointed flashback sequences.
What overshadows these good qualities is that The Grifters is incredibly unpleasant to watch. Unlike most con artist movies, there is no outsider “mark” character to identify with. Roy (John Cusack), his mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston), and his paramour Myra (Annette Bening) are all in the game. The question becomes, as the poster reads, “Who’s conning who?” [sic, I think; I went to public school ;)]
Seductress Myra (Annette Bening)

But the question is actually a distraction from the real plot of the movie, a relationship-focused tragedy. None of the players is naive enough to trust anyone else, so no one gets conned. When Myra suggests to Roy that they team up, he flat out refuses. The inevitable betrayals and violence are all crimes of passion, not the planned schemes we’d expect.
Small-time con Roy (John Cusack)
Seeing this play out is an exercise in misery. And here is where I must issue spoilery trigger warnings for incest and violence against women. One scene that turned my stomach so badly I did not recover for the rest of the film depicts Lilly being intimidated by her racketeering boss Bobo Justus (how’s that for a character name with “sub”textual meaning?) after she fails at the odds-fixing racetrack scheme she works for him. I can’t even bring myself to type a description of the scene, but it is available streaming online if you want to look for it. Lilly is clearly terrified of Bobo (with good reason), but treats him with a kind humility; she hopes her sweetness and deference can save her life. The terrible thing is that it’s clear her actions and demeanor aren’t what let her survive the confrontation, but rather the whims of the man terrorizing her.
Lilly (Anjelica Huston)
Then there is the shocking violence of the third act, with such graphic gore as a woman with her face blown off on a morgue table. The Oedipal twinge to Roy’s relationship with Lilly, who had him when she was only 14 years old, comes to the fore in one of the film’s final scenes. I don’t enjoy incestual themes in any circumstances, but I found Lilly’s attempted seduction of Roy especially disturbing because she does it as a last-ditch effort to convince him to give her the cash she needs to flee Bobo’s wrath. It’s mutually non-consensual. It gets no further than a kiss, but that relief is immediately side-swept by more graphic violence.
And so The Grifters is a well-made and fantastically-acted movie that I would never recommend. Certainly some people will have a stronger tolerance than I do for its dark themes. My guess is that it’s easier to be entertained by this sort of thing when you are at the top of the kyriarchy like most film critics from the early 90’s (and sadly, today as well). But everyone else comes from a position of heightened awareness of their own vulnerability to violence and sexual assault. And that makes a movie like The Grifters seem more like a psychological weapon than a great film.

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa.

Oscar Best Picture Nominee: ‘The Help’: Same Script, Different Cast

The Help is nominated for four Oscars (Best Picture, Best Actress (Viola Davis), and Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain & Octavia Spencer), and has garnered numerous other nominations and awards.
This piece, by guest writer elle, first appeared at Bitch Flicks on October 5, 2011. 


The Help (2011)
A caveat: I have not seen The Help. I do not plan to see The Help, yet I feel pretty confident that I have The Help all figured out. If you don’t know about this film, please see this post. I’m going to ground my thoughts about The Help in two other documents I will link: Valerie Boyd’s review entitled, “‘The Help,’ a feel-good movie for white people” and “An Open Statement to the Fans of ‘The Help’” from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). A brief description from Boyd:

“The Help”—the film adaptation of the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett—is a feel-good movie for a cowardly [wrt to the ways we deal (or don’t deal) with issues of race] nation. 

Despite its title, the film is not so much about the help—the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running before the civil rights movement gave them broader opportunities—as it is about the white women who employed and sometimes terrorized them. 

And there you have it, the problem at the heart of works like The Help that blossoms into myriad other problems—the centering of white women in a story that is supposed to be about women of color, the positioning of white women as saviors who give WoC voice. As my colleagues in the ABWH note:

Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers.

I want to meld these critiques of The Help with my own critique of phenomena that make movies like this possible. My critique is rooted in who I am: My name is elle, and I am a granddaughter of The Help. And while I can never begin (and would never want) to imagine myself as the voice of black domestic workers, I can at least share some of their own words with you and tell you some places you can find more of their words and thoughts.