Verdict: Stagey but classy.
The toast of Broadway in 2008, the same year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Tracy Letts' jet-black comedy was as big as the Oklahoma plains on which it was set, a gruelling three-hour, two-interval family meltdown from which audiences emerged shell-shocked.
The screen version, whose director Wells gave us the glib and generic redundancy melodrama The Company Men, trims it down to a pretty digestible two hours. (It would have been even shorter if the entirely redundant last 10 minutes had been excised; watch for the moment when Meryl Streep walks up the stairs and resist the temptation to scream Cut!). But it's safe to say that what is left is more black than comedy.
It's as stagey as hell, though that's much of its appeal, and it is notable for another bravura performance from Streep, here playing Violet Weston, a poison-tongued matriarch who - irony alert - has been diagnosed with mouth cancer. Her Great Plains clan reunites after the disappearance (and subsequent death) of one of its members.
