Dead end
Deborah Ross
The Upside of Anger 15, Nationwide
The Upside of Anger stars Joan Allen (the wonderful, wonderful Joan Allen, that is) as Terry Wolfmeyer, a Michigan housewife whose husband of 20 years appears to have left her and their four daughters for his Swedish secretary. Terry is not happy about this. Terry freaks out, rages and hits the vodka bottle like a loon. Terry has a neighbour, Denny (Kevin Costner), a washed-up baseball player who is now a DJ and also a drunk. Together, they do a lot of drunk-ing. Terry has many shift nighties with matching dressinggowns and this is what she wears, when she is drunk-ing.
The daughters aren’t too happy about this. They do not like their mother drunking, or spending all day in her nightie, even though she has the matching dressinggowns and the colours are pretty pastels: pink; lilac; oyster-white. The daughters are all very beautiful with perfect eyebrows. The daughters all look as if they’ve won Miss Teen USA at some point. The daughters all have their own journeys to make in the face of their mother’s rage and their father’s sudden disappearance. These journeys are fairly yucky. The film finishes on a voiceover from the youngest daughter, who gives an emetic summary of the transformative effects of anger and lessons learned. I hate it when kids do this. I always want to punch them in the face and say, ‘Now, that is a lesson learned, Missy. Imagine, talking about lessons learned, at your age! Piss off!’ But all this said and you know what? This film is pretty good. Mostly, it works. Bet you weren’t expecting that, but it’s true. Why would I lie to you?
Although The Upside Of Anger doesn’t quite match the charm of, say, Little Miss Sunshine — it’s ultimately too sentimental for that; positively dissolves into hideous sentimentality at the end — it’s sufficiently quirky, well observed and darkly comic to take you to its naff conclusion in some style. There are some nice jokes. ‘Your father is a vile, horrible, selfish pig,’ says Terry, weeping, and holding her daughters tightly to her bosom, ‘but I’m not gonna trash him to you girls.’ And then there are some more nice jokes. ‘God, that was a misstep,’ is just one of her post-coital sayings.
But what, I think, sets this apart as a mainstream American movie is the fact that Terry is neither especially likeable nor especially agreeable. Terry is not a nice lady. She is brittle, bitter, self-pitying, badly behaved, exasperating. But such is the performance of the thrice Oscar-nominated Ms Allen that you can’t kind of help rooting for Terry all the same. Sure, Joan Allen can do rage and spinning out of control in a booze-addled way. Sometimes, she can even do rage until the veins throb quite frighteningly in her neck. But she is at her most brilliant and wonderful when it comes to the comic set pieces, like the one where she finds one of her daughters in bed with Shep, Denny’s middle-aged sleazeball of a boss at the radio station. Take it from me, if you’ve never seen anyone acting being speechless — literally before, then this film might be worth it just for this. Shep, by the way, likes young girls so much ‘I know the names of all the boybands and, trust me, you don’t learn that going out with a Huffington’.
But Costner, though? What about Costner? Well, he’s adorable! Totally adorable! You wouldn’t imagine it, but he is, and this is also true. Have I ever lied to you yet? Costner gives Denny just the right amount of emotional weight: lonely yet not pathetic; decent but no pushover; charmingly shambolic in an endearing, gone-toseed kind of way. He takes Terry’s postcoital conclusions in his stride. ‘My, what a sweet thing to say,’ he says. It’s the sort of role you’d more or less expect to go to Jack Nicholson, but are glad it didn’t. Nicholson can do endearing, of course, but not without a predatory edge, and that would undo Denny terribly.
The Upside of Anger is a smart, sharp comedy of manners ultimately betrayed, alas, by its catastrophic ending. It runs for 118 minutes, so it might be best to leave after 110, say. There’s also a subplot to do with Emily (one of the daughters) and her journey, her dream to be a ballet dancer, that’s too dull for words so I’ll stop the words now. Plus, you might find yourself asking the following questions: why doesn’t Terry look for her husband? And: where’s all the money coming from? And: just how many shift nighties with matching dressinggowns can a person have? Shame, though, as without the above this would have been very good and not just pretty good. Worth seeing? I don’t see why not. And now my ending, which is simply: cheese and crackers, is there a better snack for any time of the day? See, sometimes endings just aren’t worth hanging around for.
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