(2011. dir: William Friedkin) Plays and movies are not the same. Things that play like gangbusters onstage translate awkwardly onto the screen with bemusing frequency. One irony involved is that intimacy is reversed: while you'd think it's more intimate sitting in the same room as your actors, in a movie you're practically up their noses. Shakespearean actors have a blast with it because you can speak "to be or not to be" in a bare whisper, move hardly a muscle, and still deliver its depth of meaning.
But not all writers, let's be frank, are Shakespeare. Not to disrespect Tracy Letts: I saw August: Osage County onstage and it played like a dream, like a dream of a million bucks. My stepmother, no theatrical greenhorn, called it the best play she'd ever seen. Letts is the king of the morbidly dysfunctional southern family, and when I say "southern" I don't mean it in a romantic way, like thick Georgia drawls and haunted houses in Mississippi and fading Charleston aristocracy, but southern at its most prosaic: think Texas and the butt-end of Oklahoma. Letts and Friedkin have worked together before (Bug), and Friedkin knows his business, toning down the white-trash hysteria to a playable volume, containing and re-channeling the extreme trailer-grunge energy into cinematically viable ways while keeping at least some of the humor intact. It's still not enough to make it great, but it's enough to make it interesting.
Friedkin is admirably respectful of Letts' writing, but movies and plays are shaped differently for good reasons. Long scenes of snappy dialogue which can send the house into paroxysms when played onstage feel graceless and contrived on film, not only because we've come to expect shorter scenes, but in a movie theatre we, if only subconsciously, want a story told more through visuals than through exposition, and this we do not get with the play-script. In a play, people who dislike each other are stuck onstage together, and we tend to buy it as a convention of the art-form; not so much onscreen, where it seems so simple to walk into the next room to escape.
The whole shebang is made worth watching largely because Friedkin knows a thing or two about casting. Only Emile Hirsch fails as the debt-ridden Chris, instigator of the action (he owes money, his detested mother has an insurance policy, he has the name of a killer they can hire), unable to summon the glimpse or two of humanity necessary to win us to his side. All the other characters are as flawed and all but one (his semi-innocent and damaged sister, played without a hitch by Juno Temple) are as nasty, and yet the actors (Gina Carano as the slutty and self-serving stepmother, Thomas Haden Church as the thick-headed and self-serving father, Matthew McConaughey as the killer) show us three dimensions and so we accept them, awful as they are. Marc Macaulay, in his single scene as the small-town godfather Digger Soames, is utterly delightful.
It's easy to divide the bulk of film actors into two camps: actors and Movie Stars. Some (Duke, Marilyn, Elizabeth Taylor) are undeniably great movie stars without coming close to being great actors. An actor shifts masks and personas, whereas the emblematic attributes of the Movie Star are a conspicuous, unchanging presence combined with a constant and powerhouse charisma. (Also, the camera never stops loving a true Movie Star, no matter how altered by age or maquillage.) Some more tricksterly types shift back and forth across the line (Clift or Dean, maybe, or DeNiro, who used to be able to go from Nitrogylcerine Charisma to none at all from one role to the next).
McConaughey is a Movie Star, no question, because his voice is unmistakable and his charisma cannot be disguised, but I've always said he's had undeserved short shrift as an actor. If you still need proof of the man's skill, watch Magic Mike, Bernie, and this one together, all three performances from the last few years. Or, in fact, go back and look at his first performances: in Lone Star, a Time to Kill, and Dazed and Confused. The ability is already there: he has the power to carry the dramatic lead, the aptitude to sidestep into an enigmatic smaller role, and the comic timing to deliver the drollities. It's all there from the beginning, and he's been honing his chops for years. As this eponymous mercenary, he's found the wisdom to avoid going for the obvious laugh lines, and that's necessary, because those broad, jokey ironies which play well to the loges would lose their zing in this context of intimacy.
In the Grand Guignol of the climactic scene, a long one of bullying, forced disclosures, and grotesque humiliation, even McConaughey's focus and dignity and the admirably unwavering skills of Carano and Haden Church cannot completely overcome the ugly silliness of the script. As with so many filmed plays, the word "contrived" keeps springing to mind. Still, just about everything besides the script works so well here, I wonder if either Letts can learn to write for the screen, or if Friedkin can find someone just as talented who can. That's one of my cinematic wishes for the new year.
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