Meryl Streep has gone broader in her acting as her career has continued to explode. Between a vicious nun, Julia Child, a scathing magazine editor and Margaret Thatcher, her roles as an ordinary everywoman from “Manhattan” and “Kramer vs. Kramer” have somewhat faded in memory.
With a role like Violet Weston, Streep is playing the broadest and vilest in her career. The character from Tracy Letts’s play “August: Osage County”, unseen by me, is infamous, and people have been quick to label Streep as merely scene-chewing. Her challenge as an actress is to rise above the bigness and vices of her character, to show a wounded, sympathetic and tragic figure underneath all the bile.
When we first meet her in “August: Osage County,” she’s worn, frumpy and unrecognizable, sporting the thin hairdo she had in the concentration camp in “Sophie’s Choice,” this time ravaged by chemo therapy. But with her big black wig on or not, she shows no vulnerability in taking swipes at her family while being slightly endearing in the process. Continue reading “August: Osage County”