Beverly Weston (Sam Shepard) has disappeared from the rural Oklahoma home he shares with his wife, Violet (Meryl Streep). In his absence, their three daughters, Barb (Julia Roberts), Karen (Juliette Lewis), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and Violet’s sister, Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) assemble, with the men and children in their lives in tow (a supporting cast of husbands, fiancés, and offspring that includes Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Dermot Mulrooney, Benedict Cumberbatch and Abigail Breslin). Near-silent Johnna (Misty Upham), a Native American woman hired as house-help by Beverly in the days before his disappearance, serves as a underscore to Violet’s virulent racism. When Beverly is found dead, the family vigil turns funereal, the Westons making mourning as dysfunctional a process as everything else they do.

“This is the plains […] a state of mind, a spiritual affliction like the blues”

In the waiting time that follows death, lulls of conversation and reflection are interspersed with familial skirmishes and outright battles. Tracy Letts’s sharp-tongued women, led by Violet, provoke one another continually, revealing a brokenness of blood, ties that bind close but offer little comfort. Although mother and sisters are ostensibly gathered to find and then to grieve Beverly Weston, his loss seems less painful than their relationships with one another. Confessions and betrayals follow, one after another. The film several times invokes Eric Clapton’s Lay Down Sally: the music a jaunty counterpoint to the emotional claustrophobia of the Weston household, the lyrics unexpectedly reflecting it.

Visually, the story expands in transition from stage to film, the landscape as much a character as any member of the Weston family. “This is the plains,” Barb tells her husband, “a state of mind, a spiritual affliction like the blues,” a line that breathes against the live rolling backdrop of Oklahoma fields, gravel roads, shimmering summer heat rising from the dust.

… each generation is foundered by the wounds and secrets of the one before.

The Westons suspire within a weather of their own, a micro-climate of perpetual pre-storm that boils into tempest and settles back into tension, from which there is no real peace or relief. Riddled with addictions and lies, each generation is foundered by the wounds and secrets of the one before. The Weston women have moments of grace for each other, but more often than not these are swallowed by a misery barely alleviated by the occasional burst of insight into one another’s lives. For all that, the film is funny, with a fittingly dark and caustic humor. Violet in particular has a gift for turning a conversation from bitter to comical and back again, and Streep plays her as outrageously bombastic as she is, a grandstanding narcissist simultaneously fragile and vindictive.

Well into the third act of the film, Johnna precipitates an event that sends the family spiraling outward again, dominoes falling away from Violet towards the distances to which they had fled in the first place. A tale that never promised resolution, AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY’s ending can only barely be called that, a moment as open as the reach of the horizon.

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