From left, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Nicholson in August: Osage County (The Weinstein Company)

In a voice soaked in whiskey, poet/academic Beverly Weston (Sam  Shepard, at his most dissolute) tells his caretaker, with some resignation, that he has given himself up to a higher power—booze. And so, apparently, has his wife, Violet, played by Meryl Streep in another transformative role, made up with just strands of hairs sprouting from her bald scalp, walking haltingly and bowled over, eyes unfocused. She has “a touch of cancer,” according to her husband—cancer of the mouth to be exact, which doesn’t prevent her from vomiting venom at her family. Even without her medical condition, she would pop every pill Big Pharma has to offer.

The most glaring difference between John Wells’s film version of Tracy Letts’s corrosive Broadway dramedy of a combusting family is the timing. The three-act play is well written, and not only for its layering and then  demolishing of the Weston family’s house of cards. What gives the play an advantage is the extent to which this large Oklahoma clan is indifferent to one another during a hot late-summer reunion. Its cringe-worthy bad behavior gave it a hip edge to the escalating secrets and lies.

On stage, the dialogue was primed to the audience’s reaction of guffaws and gasps—there is vitriol in these verbal disputes. But on screen, there are momentum-killing pauses. For such reckless, addled, and incited characters, they think too much before they speak. Letts’s vipers have been defanged, and there’s little indication that their brawling would elicit raucous laughter in its original form.

There’s also the matter of approach. If anything, the camera brings us a little too close to Violet’s vulnerability—and the film keeps cutting back to medium close-ups of Streep. Many in the large all-star ensemble barely have any face time, like Benedict Cumberbatch, bizarrely cast as a simple, down-home shy boy. Streep’s Violet is less the play’s monstrous matriarch than scared and sensitive, as seen in the many shots of Violet sizing up her competition, er, her daughters, calculating what insult to unleash, what family secret to drop. Though it’s a well-thought-out performance,  it’s too much so for Violet, who mostly cares for her next dose. Sometimes just a fix is more than sufficient for motivation (see Lee Remick in Days of Wine and Roses). As a result, the family fights are too cerebral, not careless or callous.

The direction has turned the script into something more familiar, a confessional family drama with formulaic teary moments. Even Julia Roberts, as Violet’s oldest and most confrontational daughter, sincerely means it when she demands her mother to “eat the fucking fish… eat the fish, bitch,” dialogue that calls out for a full-on meltdown, less anger, and more lunacy.