Suburban blight
Joan Allen's desperate housewife almost redeems The Upside of Anger.
From: The San Francisco Bay Guardian
by: Cheryl Eddy
IN A BEAUTIFULLY appointed home in Detroit's tony outskirts, cool blond Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) wakes up to find her husband missing. And since Terry's no dummy – yeah, she knows that motherfucker's off canoodling with his Swedish secretary – her reaction is to get really, truly, royally pissed off. As The Upside of Anger illustrates over and over again, hell hath no fury like Terry Wolfmeyer scorned. The woman's not just upset; she's a Gray Goose Vodka-powered tornado of rage.
This could be Diary of a Mad White Woman, except Terry's AWOL hubby isn't around to feel her wrath. In the damage path: daughters Hadley (Alicia Witt), Emily (Keri Russell), Andy (Erika Christensen), and Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood) and affable neighbor Denny (Kevin Costner), a baseball star turned radio personality who anoints the newly single Terry his "drinkin' buddy," though it's clear he'd like her to be more. Factor in Denny's lascivious producer, Shep (played by Anger writer-director Mike Binder), and you have nearly enough characters for a high-anxiety version of The Brady Bunch, including a dog that all but vanishes after wreaking Tiger-style havoc in the first act.
Binder – director of 1993 Big Chill wannabe Indian Summer and most recently known for his creator-star role on the unfortunate HBO series The Mind of the Married Man – is clearly aiming for an American Beauty, dark-heart-of-suburbia vibe. Terry's youngest daughter, aspiring documentary filmmaker Popeye, attends a chichi high school where "Did you know I come from a broken home?" passes for a pickup line. Oldest child Hadley graduates pregnant from college and marries her doormat boyfriend, to Terry's utter disgust, while wannabe dancer and maybe-anorexic Emily is elated when she's accepted to art school, only to be shot down by Terry: "It's not gonna happen." Terry is most infuriated, however, by Andy, who cheerfully beds the much older Shep en route to a sweet job at the radio station; that relationship begets Anger's most memorable awkward-mealtime scene (the film is filled with 'em), when Terry imagines Shep's head exploding into a million bloody, dirty-pervert pieces.
A veteran of films including The Ice Storm, The Bourne Supremacy, and The Contender (where she met then-costar Binder), Allen is at her brittle best here. Often seen in supporting roles, she digs into Terry, a vicious spin on all those "wife and mother" parts Allen must be dead sick of playing. In lesser hands, a character like this could totally alienate the audience, but Allen's able to shape bitchy Terry into a deeply wounded woman whose raw, long-repressed emotions are finally getting the better of her. Sometimes her eruptions are cathartic, as when she rips Shep a new one for dating her daughter (his argument in return, "But younger women are nicer," is less convincing). Most times, though, Terry vents with cringeworthy vehemence, crumbling only when a crisis (send in the mysterious movie illness, stat!) sends shock waves through her boozy facade.
Weirdly, the cast's biggest, most commercial name is also its most welcome addition. Who'd have guessed that Costner – last seen pulling a Shep in real life, marrying a much younger blond in flashy celebrity style – would be willing to go the full schlub and with such winning results? First seen creeping around the Wolfmeyer house, clutching a can of Budweiser and displaying an obvious paunch, the besotted Denny is somehow willing to overlook Terry's poisonous personality, patiently taking abuse and coming back for more. His World Series-winning glory (an echo of Costner's many cinematic fields of dreams) is important to him, but he'd rather plan for a future with Terry – if she'd mellow out some – than linger on his past, which offers him little in the way of emotional fulfillment (the extra cash he earns from all those autographed baseballs, however, is another matter entirely).
With Binder pulling the strings, Anger lurches at times, mixing melodrama with occasionally crude humor and a last-act twist that very nearly betrays the film's hooray-for-anger message. If nothing else, his film is well timed, a companion piece to the darkly comic Desperate Housewives and reality gawkfests like Wife Swap and Supernanny. Anger's tone also echoes earlier so-called women's films featuring heroines whose lives revolve around their household dramas. But the outspoken Terry is hardly repressed; she's a thoroughly aggressive, nearly masculine character. Unfortunately, she's robbed of some depth since Binder provides scant backstory on either her marriage or pre-jilted self, save a brief aside from Popeye that her mother was once a happy person. Ultimately – Allen's fearless performance aside – Anger lacks the scope and depth of a film like American Beauty, offering an entertaining, well-cast, occasionally sharp, but not entirely insightful take on distorted domestic bliss.