Review: 'The Upside of Anger' Packs Punch
From: The Associated Press March 8, 2005
by: Christy Lemire
Is it too early to start thinking about top-10 lists and Academy Award nominations? That's how good "The Upside of Anger" is, and that's how powerful the performance is from Joan Allen, its mesmerizing star.
Already a three-time Oscar nominee (for "The Contender," "The Crucible" and "Nixon"), Allen turns in tour-de-force work here as Terry Wolfmeyer, the wealthy mother of four daughters coping with her husband's disappearance.
She assumes he's taken off with his Swedish secretary and reacts by alternately swilling vodka all day in her nightgown and ripping the scoundrel's clothes out of his closet. You could call it the diary of a mad white woman - except Mike Binder's film has all the nuance, subtlety and believability that Tyler Perry's recent "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" lacks.
As writer-director, Binder (who created the HBO series "The Mind of the Married Man") never strikes a false note. It helps that he has amassed a talented, eclectic cast to fill his well-drawn roles (Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Erika Christensen and Evan Rachel Wood play the radiant Wolfmeyer girls) which includes Kevin Costner, doing his best work in more than a decade.
You also have to give Binder credit for saving the most unattractive role for himself: He plays a crass, fortysomething radio producer who slurps his soup, wears a bushy mustache and has an unabashed proclivity for girls half his age. Costner, though, as former baseball star Denny Davies, is a close second.
Denny represents what would have happened if Crash Davis made it to the majors, won the World Series and subsequently let his life fall apart. Costner's so good here partly because he's back in that familiar baseball world, following "Bull Durham," "Field of Dreams" and "For Love of the Game." But he also isn't taking himself so seriously, something he's done too often of late. He reminds us that he's still that engaging Southern California boy, even at 50 and - for sake of the character - even after letting his belly grow and his receding hairline go wild.
Terry finds in Denny an unexpected and, initially, an unwanted ally. As her neighbor in an upscale Detroit suburb, Denny first approaches her mid-afternoon with a Budweiser tall-boy in his hand, pestering her about some nearby land he wants to develop. The two become drinking buddies, then friends, and ultimately lovers. (And Binder really nails the alcoholism here. He doesn't glamorize it or judge his characters. He just shows, realistically, the way drinking binds people and enslaves them.)
Denny, a radio show host who talks about everything but baseball, ends up insinuating himself in the Wolfmeyer household and becomes an ersatz father figure to the girls. Hadley (Witt), the oldest, is graduating from college and has announced she's pregnant and getting married. Emily (Russell, and it's good to see her again) is a ballet dancer who's just been accepted to a small arts college. Andy (Christensen) doesn't even want to go to college - she wants to start working now as a journalist. And the youngest, a junior-high student who goes by Popeye (Wood), is an aspiring documentarian making a film about anger, which serves as the film's narration.
Terry is searing and totally uncompromising as she deals with the girls and their various outbursts and acts of rebellion, all the while wrestling with her own sense of abandonment. And Allen flashes with complete conviction between a wide range of emotions: fear, nervousness, vulnerability, impatience, cruelty, flirtiness and (eventually) something like love.
"The Upside of Anger" will draw natural comparisons to "American Beauty" for ripping the veneer off genteel upper-middle class life to expose the angst and insecurity, all the while maintaining a dark sense of humor. This new movie is actually preferable, though, in the same way Costner here is preferable. It doesn't seem so self-important. It just seems real.