Meryl Streep/Julia Roberts Film "August: Osage County" Called "The Feel Good Film Of The Year" By Eminent Psychotherapist Because, She Says, "It Makes Your Own Family Seem Sane"

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Noted psychotherapist and author, Stacy Kaiser, has pronounced the film, "August: Osage County", for which Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts have been nominated for acting Oscars, "the feel good film of the year."  While this may seem to fly in the face of the top-of-the-voice arguments which fill the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy play by Tracy Letts from which the film is adapted, Kaiser says "seeing the laughs elicited from this kind of family battle can have a salubrious effect on people who have themselves endured such family dysfunction in childhood or throughout their lives."

"Many people are weighed down by the conviction that nobody else had to endure the strains of their own particular childhood," says Kaiser, author of the Harper/Collins published self-help book "How To Be A Grown Up."  "The basis of unhappiness and inability to act grown up for many people," she points out, "is their conviction that no one else ever had as dysfunctional a family life in childhood as they.   A film like "August: Osage County," with its hilariously raucous, rancorous tirades acted out with the unsparing talent of iconic stars at their best, allows childhood-scarred individuals to see people who make their own families seem sane.  And to be able to laugh at the same conflicts they survived can be cathartic.  There's something very freeing in the discovery that you weren't the only one, that there are many kinds of normal."

The psychotherapist to numerous stars and celebrities observes that "the willingness of Ms. Streep and Ms. Roberts, who respectively have been nominated for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Academy Awards for their performances in this film, to draw dark characters with such comic vigor has been restorative to a number of people with whom I've spoken."

"The past is the past," Kaiser says.  "We can't change that, but sometimes we can learn to look at it through different eyes."

SOURCE Stacy Kaiser