This is one of those stories about dysfunctional families coming together that usually take place over a Thanksgiving weekend or at Christmas. In this case, it’s a disappearance, but the elements are the same. Start with the mother, whose pain-pill dependence and freewheeling tongue provide another scenery-chewing role for Meryl Streep. Her husband (Sam Shepard) is a onetime poet who, oddly provides the opening narration, quoting T. S. Eliot, then goes missing. Soon after, the daughters show up. Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), the caretaker, has never left Oklahoma. Flighty Karen, the youngest, chattiest, and cheeriest, comes from Florida with her fiancé (Dermot Mulroney). Barbara (Julia Roberts), the eldest, is the one most resentful of, but most like, her mother. She brings her estranged husband (Ewan McGregor) and her daughter (Abigail Breslin). If we knew the future, she tells the 14-year-old , “we’d never want get up in the morning.”
The rich dialogue is among the pleasures of this adaptation of the Tracy Letts play; Letts himself provides the script, and it retains a certain play-like quality and structure, although a few scenes are set outdoors. This means lots of dialogue, well-crafted characters, and a lot of confrontational scenes, any of which, in some other movie, might be the centerpiece scene. Many of these are funny, which means the heavy themes — addiction, alcoholism, adultery, to take just the letter A — never seem ponderous. Instead, they provide just the right mixture of pathos and juicy revelation.
IMDb link
viewed 1/19/14 1:00 pm at AMC Marple; posted 1/22/14
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