Movies v. plays: Dysfunction: Osage County

It's very interesting to think about why some plays translate or have translated well into film and others are disasters. Think of how great Streetcar Named Desire seems on film - and why is that so, aside from the huge talent of the cast and crew? Perhaps the play itself seems more cramped and internal, so when it's filmed almost entirely in interiors we're in the mood of the play itself rather than feeling as if the cinema is being hampered by the material. I remember thinking that Driving Miss Daisy was a very good translation into film - in that the screenwriter had a very good sense of how to open up the material, to use exteriors effectively as part of the narration and not just as a chance to show that we're not really confined to a stage. This year's American Much Ado About Nothing was one of the best Shakespeare adaptations to film I've ever seen, taking place mostly on the grounds of a single house but using both interiors and exteriors to help define the characters and their relations (the great party scene by poolside, for example). So what makes August: Osage County such a failure, despite the all-star cast and a good, scenery chewing lead performance by Meryl Streep and a strong performance in a non-glamor role by Julia Roberts? Throughout, consistently, it felt as if we were watching a play. Oddly, we accept more artifice in a theater, we accept that actors in a play speak non-naturally (perhaps it's the long tradition of theatrical language, also that characters have to project - and we don't have access to close-ups, cross-cuts, etc.). While we accept artifice from live actors, oddly, we expect verisimilitude from characters on film. Thanks to close-ups, handheld cameras, the history of documentary realism, we expect that what we are seeing in movies is "real life," and that characters in movies should speak natural, not theatrical, dialogue. Characters who seem to be speaking dialogue in a movie are non-credible - and though Tracy Letts's script is really strong, it comes across as artificial. A few moments of high drama - such as the china-smashing scene near the end - are fine as highlights, but the supercharged language, over two hours, makes the characters seem flat rather than round. Exteriors are used very poorly - a long stupid scene when Roberts and Magregor are arguing about their marriage while carrying chairs is a case in point, no reason to bring them outside other than camera boredom. In short, the characters feel distant and abstract - in the way actors never do in live theater -making it all the harder to care about the dysfunctionality of this family and the constant outbursts of the drug-addled Streep, the embittered Roberts, et al.