From an evolutionary sense, anger makes sense. It might have sent civilization teetering off balance, but in individuals, it insures that you got enough to eat and a good seat by the fire, not to mention a better shot at having your chromosomes play in the genetic pool. Like most stuff that did us all a great deal of good out there on the savannahs before civilization, its value didn’t translate simply from pre-history, to post-. That’s a good way to look at Mike Binder’s film, THE UPSIDE OF ANGER, in which he parses the emotion with a devilishly refreshing insight.
It begins with a funeral, we don’t know whose, and a narrator telling us that the striking blonde woman (Joan Allen) on whom the camera is focusing is her mother, the nicest woman in the world. Or at least she was. The rest of the film is a flashback leading back to that moment and showing in sometimes uncomfortable detail how Terry, the striking blond, changed into a woman who wasn’t so nice, but was finally at peace. Thus begins one of the most intelligent, most honest, most moving dissections of human interaction to hit the screen in a long time, and also one of the funniest.
Flashback to how it all began. Terry, unsteady from shock, anger, and perhaps a little of the alcohol that will plague her days in the months to come, announces over the breakfast to her three daughters that their father is gone. In the dead of night, he’s slipped from their lives in order to run off to Sweden with his secretary. The daughters, each dealing with varying degrees of anger over this and over the everyday stuff of their lives, pull together, pull apart, and play interesting practical jokes involving the family dog.
As for Terry, she gets caught up in the land dispute involving her erstwhile husband and their neighbor, Denny (Kevin Costner), a guy who has resigned himself to the fact that he lived his dream but somehow missed the boat. He’s an ex-jock with a sports radio show in which he refuses to discuss sports, a model home which he treats like a closet, and boundary issues that find an unlikely target in Terry. She has loathed him for a variety of reasons for a very long time, but when Denny turns on his peculiar brand of charm, she finds the loathing is still there, but it’s acquired an unlikely companion: lust. Is it the awakening of long dormant feelings? Is it revenge on her absent spouse? Is it an externalization of the self-loathing she feels over being abandoned? The magical thing to Allen’s performance is that it could be any or all of them and each rings equally true.
Allen gives the performance of her already impressive career as she gets to the essential truth of a woman at loose ends when her world falls apart. Her Terry is a classy, acerbic, only slightly klutzy lush whose problem is that she sees life just a little too clearly. She can throw a temper tantrum without a word and encapsulate an hour’s worth of invective into 30 seconds. For his part, Costner turns in the best performance since his early career by abandoning the mythically heroic persona that inspires little aside from parody in favor of honest humanity with all its endearing foibles, flaws, and failings.
There are no cheap jokes here, nothing forced and nothing out of character for any of the players. Instead, Binder relies on the carefully constructed layers with which he’s endowed these people, so that they can make us laugh, surprise us, and move us to tears, sometimes all at once. Nothing better exemplifies that than the confrontation xxx has at one daughter’s wedding with the sleazeball whom one of her other daughters is dating. What each reveals to and about the other is a revelation that leaves everyone involved, including the audience, speechless and just a little off balance.
THE UPSIDE OF ANGER is suffused with brittle, dry humor, the kind wielded as sword and shield against the ravages of emotional pain too difficult or dangerous to be dealt with, but too overwhelming to be ignored. The ensemble cast never misses a step while walking the fine line of that humor and the emotional hunger that lurks urgently beneath it.
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