Directed by John Wells
(R)
**
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“When a movie is based on a celebrated play, the first question to ask is, does it play?” said Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly. The answer is a qualified yes for this adaptation of Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play about a toxic family reunion, but the conflagration feels too meticulously staged. “I went with it, but I didn’t totally buy it.” Meryl Streep stars as a vicious Oklahoma matriarch whose adult daughters return home when their father disappears, and though Streep is plenty engaging as a pill-popping harridan, “it seems all too evident” that she and an almost equally belligerent Julia Roberts “were hoping to reap Oscar glory,” said Elizabeth Weitzman in the New YorkDaily News. Still, “with actors of this caliber, even overemoting can entertain.” That won’t be enough in the long run, said Ben Kenigsberg in the A.V. Club. Letts’s opus “always played as if it had been consciously designed to be a staple of American theater,” but this “heavy-handed” adaptation doesn’t convey why it possibly belongs in the canon. “It’s not so much a mangled movie as a forgettable one.”
