Film distributors often fill the odd
intermezzo between the late-year Oscar shoehorning and the explosive appearance
of those sure harbingers of warm weather, the blockbuster action flicks, with
some small, sometimes unclassifiable pictures.
The late winter dumping time may
explain the considerable quantity of favorable publicity surrounding Mike
Binder’s new picture, The Upside of Anger.
Its subject, the sort of suburban domestic agony that traditionally dominated
the fiction pages of The New Yorker,
with all those stories by John Cheever and John Updike, apparently still
fascinates a number of journalists, which may also explain the remarkable
critical success in recent years of such films as Ordinary People, Terms of
Endearment, and American Beauty.
The movie focuses on a not untypical
marital crisis, the plight of an abandoned wife, in this case a woman whose
husband has suddenly and inexplicably taken off and left her with four
daughters and an enormous burden of loneliness, desperation, and hostility. The
picture begins and ends with a funeral — the same funeral — with a young
girl’s voiceover narration helpfully advising us that anger can sometimes
produce beneficial results, then jumps gracelessly to a line of prose dating
the action three years earlier.
The story the voice recounts reopens
with the situation of Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen), who must somehow come to
terms with her husband’s completely unexpected and unexplained departure and
deal with the problem of raising her four daughters, the oldest in college, the
youngest in high school, alone.
Unlike most women in her situation,
Terry suffers no apparent financial problems; the movie concentrates instead on
other sorts of difficulties. She and her daughters, who attend private schools,
live in a posh suburb of Detroit, drive nice cars, and seem to lack for little
in the way of creature comforts and material goods. The real subject of the
film involves the anger of the title, which not only translates as Terry’s
understandable rage toward her husband, but also as the cruel, incessant
tension between mother and daughters that the rage creates.
For much of the movie Terry spends
her days drifting around the house in her nightgown, mindlessly watching
television, and slurping up vodka by the gallon. A goofy neighbor, Denny Davies
(Kevin Costner), a retired baseball player and talk show host, who initially
visits her to ask her husband about buying some of his property, becomes
something like a drinking buddy, practically a daily presence in her house and
her family’s life, and after a suitable time, her lover. Despite a number of
obstacles and mistakes, his relationship with her and her smart, sophisticated
daughters ultimately works positive results in all their lives, presumably one
of the upsides of anger.
Because the movie must handle the
problems of a handful of people, it tends to diffuse its focus by dealing with
a number of different relationships — Terry’s with each of her daughters,
Denny’s with Terry, and the various daughters’ connections to other people. The
oldest daughter announces at her college graduation that she is pregnant and
about to marry her boyfriend; another devotes herself so deeply to ballet and
feels such anger at her mother that she suffers a stomach ulcer; another
decides to take a job Denny wangles for her at his radio station and winds up
in bed with his producer (Mike Binder); the youngest falls for a classmate who
turns out to be gay, and so on.
With so much going on among its
characters, the movie tends to dissipate its energy and slacken its tension, so
that the initial emotional distress flattens out into mild annoyance and even
softens into laughs and gags. (The writer-director began his career as a
comedian, after all). Kevin Costner, who has finally hung up his spikes after Field of Dreams, Bull Durham, and For Love of
the Game, approaches the part of the former ballplayer with a relaxed ease
that serves him well in the lighter moments but seems inadequate to the more
heavily emotional occasions.
Finally receiving the recognition she
deserves, Joan Allen behaves in an exemplary manner in her central role,
combining a kind of antiseptic sexiness with a convincingly scary anger — at
one point she fixes Mike Binder with a basilisk stare that unmans him more
thoroughly than the sock she delivers a few minutes later.
The picture’s final scenes clarify
the meaning of the funeral that bookends the action, once again demonstrating
some of the point of the title. At the same time, the utterly preposterous
premise that establishes all the action, character, and emotion, and makes that
clarification possible represents both a retreat from meaning and a baldly
ridiculous conclusion, destroying all the verisimilitude the director obviously
intends. Ultimately, beyond its exploration of an engaging and emotionally
fraught situation, The Upside of Anger makes very little sense.
The Upside of Anger (R), starring
Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell,
Alicia Witt, Mike Binder, Tom Harper; written and directed by Mike Binder. Cinemark Tinseltown, Regal Culver Ridge,
Regal Eastview, Regal Henrietta
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.
