Wooing the jilted mom next door

From: Newsday March 11, 2005
by: Gene Seymour

Mike Binder's engaging comedy-drama presents Joan Allen and Kevin Costner as they've too rarely been seen before. The former is a sexy, mercurial abandoned wife, the latter her beery, ingratiating next-door neighbor. Erica Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell and Alicia Witt are her smart, stunning daughters. Sexual situations, vulgar language, drug use, mild violence. 1:56. At area theaters.

Look up "long-suffering woman" in a hypothetical directory of Hollywood types and it's likely that Joan Allen's face will be the most up-to-date illustration. Even when she's playing hard cases like the morally suspect middle-management spy in "The Bourne Supremacy," Allen somehow seems as if her steely veneer will be warped any moment by a cry for help swelling from deep within.

That she ably carries such subtleties in her work only buttresses the widely held opinion that Allen sits at or near the pinnacle of her profession. Yet the movies haven't rewarded Allen's formidable talent with a star turn that cuts her loose and unfurls her resources. Until now.

"The Upside of Anger" starts out where most movies seem to leave Allen: as a victim of a man's thoughtlessness. Allen's character, Terry Wolfmeyer, finds her husband vanished, apparently leaving her without so much as a goodbye, with his secretary. This sudden turn pitches Terry into a dark, smoldering rage from which she can't emerge.

Not even the sight of her four gorgeous, self-possessed daughters - sultry Andy (Erika Christensen), fragile Emily (Keri Russell), sensible Hadley (Alicia Witt) and sensitive Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood) - can ease Terry's festering emotional sores. If anything, the girls often seem to bring out their mom's inner sniper as she shoots down their aspirations in her scramble for other surrogate targets.

One would think the perfect outlet for Terry's rage is next-door neighbor Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), a divorced, ex-baseball superstar who, for reasons never satisfactorily explained, will sell his autograph to the highest bidder but won't discuss his sport on his drive-time radio show. Though he does catch much of the back draft of Terry's bitterness, Denny becomes her drinking buddy and, not long afterward, her lover. But recreational sex alone isn't enough to smooth Terry's jagged edges that scrape everyone and everything that gets close to her.

Writer-director Mike Binder writes breezy, bristly dialogue that occasionally stumbles into the overly explicit or oracular. His now-defunct HBO series, "The Mind of the Married Man," indulged in the kind of egregious men-are-schnooks palaver. Here, such palaver informs his role as Denny's oily, libidinous producer, who's condemned by both Terry and the movie for dating his employee Andy.

But the cast redeems the project from such gratuitous excesses. And it is time, once again, to say to Kevin Costner: Enough, already, with playing icons! We've wasted our time and yours trying to make you into "the next Gary Cooper (or James Stewart or Steve McQueen or whomever)." It's when you take on flawed, self-deprecating regular guys like Denny that your true star shines through.