Rumors that this movie was almost released with the title Watch Meryl Streep Eat Her Own Babies are patently untrue.
That said, everything else about this darkly funny drama *is* true in the most important sense: it feels true. The characters are real and complicated, never simply good or evil. The problems encountered are too broad and too deep to be any single character’s fault.
And, somehow, director John Wells (The West Wing, Company Men) and screenwriter Tracey Letts (who wrote the play on which the movie is based, along with the spectacular Killer Joe), got a studio’s permission to let this material go where it wants to go.
The result feels less like a movie and more like eavesdropping on a bitter family dinner. Watching Meryl Streep eat her own babies is unsettling at first, but she’s so very good at eating them, and some of them so deserve to be eaten, we can’t avert our eyes.
Recommended — but there’s no rush, though, since Osage County is going to be playing on a thousand screens non-stop through February at least.
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