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August: Osage County

Opens Fri., Jan. 10 at Guild 45th and 
other theaters. Rated R. 118 minutes.

Tracy Letts won the Pulitzer Prize for his play August: Osage County, and he has written the screenplay for this film. If you seek a useful yardstick for the distance between stage and screen, this movie provides one: Here is a writer adapting his own work for the movies, and there is almost no evidence of how this display of canned yammering could possibly have won a high literary honor.

Admittedly, if you imagine everything playing out on one set, with August ’s overlapping dramatic arcs and crafted one-liners creating an actors’ showcase, the thing could work as a dramatic night in the theater. But open all that up to the outdoors, dissipate the pressure-cooker structure with lapses in time, and let director John Wells add a sentimental spirit to the proceedings, and you’ve got one middling movie. Osage County is in Oklahoma, where the lemony matriarch of the Weston family, Violet (Meryl Streep), has gathered the clan in the aftermath of tragedy. She has three daughters, and while she treats sensible Ivy (Julianne Nicholson) and silly Karen (Juliette Lewis) badly enough, she saves her special venom for her favorite, Barbara (Julia Roberts). Barbara’s marriage to an academic (Ewan McGregor) is unraveling, so she’s in the mood for a tussle, and we’re going to get one.

The cast is heavy with good folk, including Margo Martindale as Violet’s overshadowed sister (Chris Cooper plays her easy-livin’ husband), and an uncharacteristically tongue-tied Benedict Cumberbatch. All those family tensions take time to sort out, but it really comes down to Barbara standing up to her mother—and to Streep and Roberts playing with the material like prizefighters. And while Streep is the savvy, surgical Muhammad Ali to Roberts’ blunt-punching Joe Frazier in that match, there’s a sense that even Dame Meryl is coasting on technique here. The gotcha dialogue is just a little too easy, and Wells (who directed the dreary Company Men in 2010) encourages everybody to bop their lines right on the nose.

This big serving of ham and eggs wants to be taken seriously. The Weinstein Company’s ad campaign, which emphasizes the family bitch-fest angle, suggests they know otherwise. August can be enjoyed on that level, but if you think too hard about what a Pulitzer is, your head will hurt. Robert Horton

PFaust

Runs Fri., Jan. 10–Thurs., Jan. 16 
at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 135 minutes.

For a movie called Faust, director Alexander Sokurov takes his sweet time getting to the money shot. The film is at least three-quarters done by the time Faust—here a philosophical surgeon in a grubby, early-19th-century German village—gets around to signing away his soul to the devil. But this is only one of the many variations the Russian filmmaker has played on the famous tale, a delirious and destabilizing version that took the top prize at the 2011 Venice Film Festival.

After a wild special-effects shot that descends from the heavens (a flight through the clouds that perhaps pays homage to a similar sequence in F.W. Murnau’s great silent Faust from 1926), we meet Faust (Johannes Zeiler) in the middle of an autopsy. Carving up a distinctly unappetizing specimen and once again failing to find the soul located in any of the organs that flop from the corpse, Faust stomps off in a discouraged snit. Much of the rest of the movie springs from his encounter with a moneylender named Muller (Anton Adasinsky), whose ability to taunt and tempt Faust marks him as the movie’s Mephistopheles character, even if he’s never blatantly outed as the devil. Sokurov follows these two around as they navigate the crumbling, muddy town, a place that occasionally emerges in warped, slanted angles or blurry visions—cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, whose talent is currently on display in Inside Llewyn Davis, must’ve gotten overtime pay for keeping up with Sokurov’s busy ideas.

Sokurov is a filmmaker of international renown who occasionally hits greatness (Mother and Son, or his single-take cruise through the Hermitage, Russian Ark).

He has said that Faust is the final film in a tetralogy about power, preceded by studies of real-life figures—Hitler (Moloch), Lenin (Taurus), and Hirohito (The Sun). Those films were stately, slow, very Russian. Maybe Sokurov got a little gassed on the witchy German mythology of Faust, because this movie is wildly different. It almost feels like 1970s-era Werner Herzog, all earthy humor and bizarre digressions; it hardly surprises us by the time Faust and Muller go for a dip at a public bathhouse and the latter is revealed to have a small tail (or something) located in his backside. Zeiler even looks a little like Bruno S., Herzog’s eccentric leading man of the ’70s.

None of which really unlocks the mystery of this Faust, although the film is a crazy fever-dream to sit through. Recommendation or warning? You decide. But it is funnier than expected, and a new wrinkle even for students of the Faust legend. Robert Horton

PGo for Sisters

Opens Fri., Jan. 10 at SIFF Film Center. 
Not rated. 123 minutes.

Since his 1979 debut, Return of the Secaucus Seven, the pioneering indie director John Sayles has never flagged in his sober commitment to exploring social issues. But he’s a realist; he knows audiences like stories. And after a handful of iffy box-office performers, Sayles cozies up to an out-and-out genre picture with Go for Sisters, which—perhaps not coincidentally—is also his best in over a decade.

For by-the-book Los Angeles parole officer Bernice (LisaGay Hamilton), life is uncharacteristically out of her control: Her adult son, a combat vet, is missing after getting mixed up in some dodgy border trouble. The only person who can help is her former high-school friend, Fontayne (Yolonda Ross), a recovering addict and ex-con. While the two investigate, they get into dicey situations in Tijuana and Mexicali, aided by disgraced ex-cop Freddy Suarez (Edward James Olmos), a low-talking freelancer whose instincts are as good as his eyesight is bad. That this plotline seems as contrived as the average TV cop show’s hardly detracts from the well-honed precision of Sayles’ dialogue or the beauty of the central performances. In other words, this is one of those examples of a storytelling hook—can the trio find Bernice’s son and avoid getting killed in the process?—carrying the weight of a serious study of milieu and character.

Sayles’ interests here include the haplessness of illegal immigrants and the strange role played by the Chinese in human trafficking across the border, as well as society’s tendency to mark a false division between sinners and innocents. Happily, all of that comes through without sacrificing our interest in this specific troupe of searchers. Ross, statuesque and street-smart, makes us believe in the weakness of her generally good-hearted character, and Olmos—even though he’s done this kind of guy before—is never less than satisfying to watch. Freddy used to be known as “El Terminator,” but his lethal powers must’ve been subtle. At this point in his disappointed life, he’s underplaying like a man who’s seen it all and is resigned to how bad things could get.

Best of all, the movie hands a big role to the well-traveled Hamilton (she had regular roles on The Practice and Men of a Certain Age), who almost never lets you catch her acting. In spots where Go for Sisters strains to connect its plot points with implausible behavior, Hamilton’s steady gaze and no-nonsense delivery practically dare you to raise an objection. I, for one, was sufficiently intimidated on that score, and stayed engrossed throughout. Robert Horton

Lone Survivor

Opens Fri., Jan. 10 at Pacific Place and other theaters. Rated R. 121 minutes.

This movie’s title, and Mark Wahlberg’s being the only face on its poster, gives you the ending but not the impetus to Peter Berg’s grueling war drama. Wahlberg plays Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who participated in a 2005 raid in Afghanistan that went terribly wrong. His bestselling 2007 memoir became a darling of the Glenn Beck/Sarah Palin right, which shouldn’t deter you from seeing Lone Survivor. Politics don’t figure in this patriotic story, and you get the feeling the raid would’ve ended badly no matter who occupied the White House. However, it takes a tough constitution to endure Berg’s long central firefight, which seems to go on forever.

Berg introduces Luttrell and his three buddies in efficient, Old Hollywood style; the others are Murphy (Taylor Kitsch), Dietz (Emile Hirsch), and Axelson (Ben Foster). Each is given a defining trait (Texan, fiancee, tattoo artist, etc.), but they’re really just parts of a single combat organism, bound by taunting and testosterone. (There are no women in the film.) As in Berg’s 2004 Friday Night Lights, the team finds coherence on the field—here meaning in the field, dropped by helicopter near a remote village to reconnoiter a hit on an Al Qaeda leader.

This is where, unlike the impeccable efficiency of the Navy SEALs in Captain Phillips, it all goes to shit. Asymmetrical warfare flips against our expensively provided foursome. Their cover is blown by goatherds. The sat-phones don’t work. Their support helicopters are pulled away to other missions. And finally they’re alone, encircled on a hilltop by 100 Taliban fighters whom Berg poses against the skyline like Indians preparing to attack a wagon train in Monument Valley.

Using occasional bursts of slo-mo for emphasis, Berg may glorify these brave SEALs, but he doesn’t romanticize combat. It’s a nasty business of ducking fire, retreating down cliffs, and packing gunshot wounds with dirt. (“Did they really shoot me in the fucking head?” one guy wonders. Yes, they did.) There have been several other military-approved combat movies since 9/11, but this one—to its credit—hardly plays like a recruitment ad. Brian Miller

Pig Death Machine

Runs Fri., Jan. 10–Thurs., Jan. 16 
at Northwest Film Forum. 
Not rated. 84 minutes.

Ah, the blessings of Kickstarter. Just because you can get a movie funded doesn’t mean you should make that movie. Underground filmmaker Jon Moritsugu and his wife/co-writer/leading lady Amy Davis want to say something about food safety and the hazards of eating meat, and they take an amusingly gonzo approach to the subject, but Pig Death Machine is still fatally undercooked. Pork parasites infect the brain of ditzy Cocojoy (Davis), miraculously raising her IQ like Flowers for Algernon. Working at the same restaurant that served her, crazy plant lady Lipton (Hannah Levbarg) eats some of the tainted swine, which gives her a very different condition: Suddenly she can hear the pleading voices of captive plants, which beg her for water and attention. (In one funny scene, blades of grass yelp in pain when she walks across the lawn.) The lo-fi aesthetic and punk-rock score hint at the class divisions of Santa Fe, where Cocojoy cleans motel toilets and Lipton eats scraps from her menial kitchen job. Then the newly brainy Cocojoy earns a fortune at the casino (unfortunately unseen), installs herself in a posh hotel, and begins studying for some unspecified purpose; meanwhile Lipton tries to find the source factory for their psychoactive pork. Yet their tales never really converge; there’s no culprit behind their conditions, and ultimately no point. Moritsugu’s flashes of surrealism and animation give Pig Death Machine a whimsical, dreamlike quality when the subject, industrial meat production, deserves a more nightmarish treatment. Brian Miller

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