The Upside of Anger

Directed by Mike Binder
Written by Mike Binder

I wanted to avoid reviewing my video rentals on this site, just because there's just so damn many of them, but The Upside of Anger is recent enough that I think I'm justified in writing about it.

In The Upside of Anger, Joan Allen, too-often relegated to playing the mom, the wife, or the boss, finally gets a meaty leading role in a movie that's not bad.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much all there is to say about the movie.

The plot, as plots go, is strictly Lifetime. After Terry Wolfmeyer (Allen) wakes up one morning to discover that her husband has abandoned the family, she and her four interchangeable daughters, played by a bevy of once-were-hot-teen-girl-stars-whose-ships-never-quite-came-in's (Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Erika Christensen, and...well, the jury's still out on Evan Rachel Wood, though any one of them could just as easily have been played by, say, Jena Malone, or Leelee Sobieski, or...fuck, I don't know, Lacey Chabert) are left to fend for themselves in the big bad world (albeit from one of those sprawling Grosse Point-ish estates that you only see on television). But before you can say Little-Women-reimagined-for-the-new-millennium (which...okay, I admit, sounds like a horrible idea), the story decides to concentrate on the clumsy courtship between Joan Allen and the stoned, drunk, washed-up ex-ballplayer next door (Kevin Costner, who to his credit, plays his role with all the paunchy schlumpiness it deserves).

Along the way, we get the laundry-list of so-called "women's movie" cliches: daughters hate mother, mother gets a new boyfriend, daughters hate mothers new boyfriend, daughter has inappropriate relationship with much older man, daughter wants to go to an "art college" of which mother disapproves, daughter falls in love with the gay boy at school, awkward meet-the-new-in-laws scene, surprise pregnancy, life-threatening disease, death in the family, magic-hour shot of the whole family pulling together (see above) - it's all here, folks.

And, of course, mother becomes a bitter, resentful alcoholic. Allen's performance is quite good, really - watch especially Terry's interactions with daughter Andy's (Erika Christensen) much-older boyfriend "Shep" (the hilarious Mike Binder, who also wrote and directed), a man who spells out to Terry's face all her own fears about why her husband left her. The main problem with the performance, and this is a problem more with Binder's script than with Allen's performance itself, is that we're supposed to be marvelling at how Terry's anger at being left turns her into a bitter, resentful alcoholic, only since we never see her as anything but a bitter, resentful alcoholic (we're only told how kind and nice and bright and chipper and etc. she used to be), we have no transformation, only performance.

Does that make sense?

[Wanted to make some crack about Mike Binder going from The Mind of the Married Man to The Mind of the Abandoned Woman here, but that shit's for amateurs.]

The Upside of Anger is not a bad movie - it's cute, unpretentious, charming (in its way), and surprisingly (to me) poignant in the end, but it's still not anything you're going to remember having seen the next day. Is it a chick thing? The most memorable scene in the film for me is when the Alicia Witt character's husband (Tom Harper) is invited over for a backyard barbecue with the family - the women exchange one or two family inanities, and then break out into spontaneous laughter that just goes on and on and on. I remember this scene only because the bewildered (and slightly fearful) look on the husband's face is exactly the look that was on mine.