Like pairing chocolate and milk or peanut butter and jelly, The Weinstein Company have sealed up an instant awards horse, getting Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts to team up for the big screen adaptation of the Tony-award winning play, “August: Osage County.”
Set to be directed by John Wells (“The Company Men”) and utilizing a screenplay by the playwright Tracy Letts, the film will find Streep once again stretching her talents playing “Violet, the drug-addicted matriarch of the working class Weston clan. Roberts will play Barbara Fordham, the oldest daughter in the family. While mom’s problems and her penchant for revealing family secrets is a big issue, Barbara is melting because her husband is cheating with a college student. They are brought together when Violet’s husband goes missing and all three of their daughters come home to rally around mom. In the process, a lot of family secrets get revealed.” Sounds pretty damn great.
Production on the film is set to begin by next summer. What effect this might have on the gestating Streep vehicle “Great Hope Springs” with Philip Seymour Hoffman and James Gandolfini, which was aiming for a March shoot, remains to be seen, but we hope it’s still in the works.
Even though both aren't exactly right for the part they're not exactly wrong either. Meryl is going to have to work to be as cold as Violet is and if Julia works as hard as she has in films like Closer she might surprise everyone. These are amazingly baity roles for both actresses. I hope they both rise to the occasion (I'm slightly more worried about Roberts coasting, she tends to rely on that otherworldly charisma a little too often.
Streep perfected playing cold in "Doubt."
Yeah, it's cliche but I'm not worried about Streep. Like, AT ALL. She's Meryl Streep. And as that Kevin whoever pointed out, she's been cold on screen before and is entirely capable as any actress could be. Roberts on the other hand…as mentioned, if she puts in work like she did in Closer, then maybe she could rise to the occasion here.