John Wells' 2013 drama gathers three adult sisters and their families back into their childhood home in Oklahoma, forcing years of buried resentment to the surface.
What is August: Osage County about?
When the patriarch of the Weston family vanishes without warning, his three grown daughters return to the sprawling Oklahoma house they grew up in, bringing husbands, partners and children along with them. What begins as a search quickly turns into an extended, uneasy family reunion under one roof with their sharp-tongued mother, whose health and temperament have both grown harder to manage in his absence. Old rivalries between the sisters resurface almost immediately, complicated further by the arrival of an out-of-town relative and a series of long-guarded secrets that neither the mother nor her daughters can keep contained once everyone is forced to sit at the same table.
About the cast
Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts lead an ensemble rounded out by Chris Cooper, Ewan McGregor, Margo Martindale, Sam Shepard, Dermot Mulroney and Julianne Nicholson.
Context & significance
Director John Wells builds the film around a single, oppressive house and a large ensemble cast, a structure common to stage-to-screen family dramas that rely on overlapping dialogue and confined spaces to build pressure. The Oklahoma setting and the size of the cast give the film room to move between several parallel storylines, marriages under strain, old grudges, a teenager caught in the middle, without losing the central image of one house holding more history than it can contain.
Watching August: Osage County on Ktime
Watching on K-Time requires logging into a free account, though the catalogue itself can be browsed without one. This title carries both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched either with a dubbed Farsi audio track or with the original English performances and Farsi subtitles, whichever a viewer prefers.