Meryl Streep is shown in a scene from “August: Osage County.” (Photo credit: The Weinstein Company)

By Steven Zeitchik
Los Angeles Times

TORONTO — As the crowd exited the premiere of “August: Osage County” at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, they were buzzing, arguing and complaining about the final scene in the black comedy starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts.

Slated to arrive in theaters on Christmas Day, the movie version of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play has a strong Oscar pedigree and is being distributed by awards powerhouse the Weinstein Co. But the ending has been modified from the stage production after test audiences rejected the original.

Now, what ending viewers will see in December remains up in the air. Letts and director John Wells are in a push-pull with producers and Weinstein executives over whether to be true to the play’s finale or stick with the modified version they unveiled at the Canadian fest.

Not that long ago, when movies were still presented on film, once a cut was locked, it was locked. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to change it, which allowed little last-minute dithering. But like so many other things that have gone digital, a finished film is never really finished until the lights go down.

(Spoiler alert: Further details about both endings lie ahead.)

Nearly anyone who saw the stage version of “August” will remember the final scene: Matriarch Violet Weston is sitting on the stairs of the house she once ruled, abandoned by her adult daughters — especially eldest Barbara, who has opted not to stay and take care of a woman who has made her and her sisters’ lives pretty miserable.

In the film version, Violet (Streep) is indeed shown toward the end of the action in the house she once ruled, calling for the Native American nurse who serves as the sort of eyes and ears of the audience. But the film doesn’t end there. Instead, in the ultimate scene, Barbara (Roberts) is driving away, which shifts the focus to the younger character and conveys in a rather different way that she’s leaving her mother.

In his first cut Wells left the ending as it was on the stage — with the shot of Violet on the stairs. But when the film was screened for early audiences they didn’t approve. “We tested it over and over again and people rebelled in the theater,” Wells said in an interview Tuesday. “They were terrified about what happened to Barbara.”

Keeping it the way it was in the play, he said, was just too alienating to the people the film needed to appeal to.

“They felt like we were hitting them on the head with a hammer. I heard it over and over again — to the point that it was, ‘Let’s see what happens if we put Violet on the steps and then cut to Barbara.’”

That went over better, with audiences now saying they had more closure with the daughter character. And so, in went the final ending for Toronto.

But that result — though blessed by Weinstein — isn’t something Wells is convinced works best. Letts and Wells continue to wonder if the original ending may be the ideal option. And Wells may yet succeed in reverting to it.

“I’m not sure I’m OK with doing it that way,” he said, referring to the current ending. “I don’t want to say there’s anything wrong with the current ending, because there isn’t. But it’s something we’re still talking about. We don’t open for three months, and it’s possible you’ll see something different.”
A Weinstein Co. spokesman would not comment.

In an interview alongside Wells, Letts agreed with the director but struck a somewhat more ambivalent note. He said he felt there was something stark and powerful about ending with Violet on the stairs — that’s how he wrote it for the stage, after all — but he also said that closing with a Barbara drive scene was OK if it clarified the matter for viewers.

“A little ambiguity is not a bad thing,” he said. “But we don’t want audience confusion, where it’s suddenly ‘I don’t know where the ball is.’ So this is what we’re trying to figure out.”

Why audiences were satisfied with a Violet-centric ending on the stage but not the screen remains an open question. Letts wryly suggested that it’s because the play didn’t afford the option; he couldn’t very well show Barbara offstage in a prop car that she pretend-drove.

Though the idea of focusing on Barbara’s leaving instead of Violet’s solitude has some implications in its own right, the conversation over the film’s ending reveals that there’s more at stake than just the plot point. There’s something of a fundamental question in the dicussion, namely: How much freedom should creators have in adapting a work as they see fit?

At the close of the “August: Osage County” movie, Meryl Streep is, symbolically speaking, standing alone. Does Julia drive? Weinstein Co. and its director are, for all the film-festival chatter, still hashing it out.