March 17-23, 2005

movies

Inverted Drama

schmaltz time: Joan Allen and Kevin Costner trip the light bathetic.

The Upside of Anger gets it backwards.

by Cindy Fuchs

"My mother was always the nicest person I ever knew," says 15-year-old Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood). "Then things changed. … Anger has turned my mother into a very sad and bitter woman. If she weren't my mother, I'd slap her." Popeye's voiceover introduces Terry (Joan Allen) as she sits before a coffin during a standard movie-opening funeral, complete with rain, black umbrellas and a crowd of extras you'll never see again. Seated across from Terry are her four daughters — Popeye, Andy (Erika Christensen), Emily (Keri Russell) and Hadley (Alicia Witt) — all wearing classy black and looking suitably sad.

So begins The Upside of Anger, written and directed by Mike Binder (The Mind of the Married Man). Lurching into the delicate and banal business of Terry's anger, not to mention her daughters' understandable bewilderment, the movie offers little in the way of complexity or sense. Rather, it serves up smug observation posing as insight and judgment posing as sympathy. Terry never works out or even comes to understand her hostility. Instead, she uses it as a blunt instrument, terrorizing her wispily inconsequential daughters and drinking vodka just about nonstop.

Denny is another story. As Terry's neighbor in suburban Detroit, he's convenient to her needs, especially since her anger is prompted by the disappearance of her husband, whom she surmises has run off to Sweden with his secretary. As an ex-major league ballplayer with a World Series ring, a reputation as a womanizer, a serious penchant for booze, and a gig as a lackadaisical talk radio host makes him a "quirky" hero. And the fact that he's played by Kevin Costner makes him a cousin (albeit a distant, lousy one) to Bull Durham's Crash Davis, still the actor's best performance.

Here it is Denny's mission to rescue Terry, or more accurately, to tolerate her rage and meanness, to model generosity and compassion for her. This even though he's generally drunk, autographing baseballs for easy cash, and seeking his own sense of self-worth in a ready-made family of beautiful, needy girls. He takes his mission seriously, though, and pursues the reluctant Terry just hard enough to earn her grudging affection. When she wonders what's wrong with her that she can't even come up with a polite post-coital compliment, he supplies the rationale: "You're good and bent out of shape, pissed off like I've never seen a woman!" They share a laugh and Denny earns himself a standing invite to dinner.

Terry and Denny's displeasures have parallels in Upside's imprecise version of the outside world. As they hunker down inside their boozy hazes, they watch a lot of TV, providing rudimentary political commentary. The news anchors showcase the "Target: Terrorism" campaign of early 2002, reporting on the anthrax scares and the war in Afghanistan. These details work in two directions (for the characters and for viewers some years after) toward the same effect, that is, to recall the trauma of 9/11 and also to suggest the prevalence, and eventual ordinariness, of the U.S. response. Fear becomes mundane, war a (mostly distant) reality, and, yawn, life goes on.

By contrast, Terry's response to trouble is ferocious. She hates her absent husband (he's a "vile, horrible pig") and wants "her girls" to respond with equal venom, though, she insists, "I'm not gonna trash him to you." (She never quite works up the nerve to contact him, so he hovers as an unfathomable void.) She turns inward, essentially abandoning her daughters who struggle, in their thinly caricatured ways, to deal with loss: college grad Hadley gets pregnant by a very nice, "not intelligent," rich boy; aspiring ballet dancer Emily stops eating; Popeye pours her observations into a class project, a video on aggression and irrationality (or something like that), while mooning cluelessly over a gay classmate; and Andy decides to get a job rather than going to college. As a PA for Denny's radio show, she ends up sleeping with his utterly sleazy producer, the clunkily named Shep Goodman (Binder), who defends his serial bedding of 20-year-olds with a flip Woody Allen flourish: "Don't knock my dating habits, they keep me young."

For viewers familiar with Binder's fictions, Shep's ostensible attractiveness to immature lovelies is something of a given, which makes it tedious as well as self-serving: Shep will prove educational for Andy, in spite of himself, and the romance, which infuriates Terry to the point that she literally decks him, provides both him and Denny with an occasion to grow up. Yay for the boys. And woe unto the girls. Aside from Allen, who is often remarkable, despite squinting furiously through much of the film, they're consigned to secondary roles in a movie that is supposedly about them and their supposed pain. Pretty and predictable, the girls in Upside have nowhere to go but down.

The Upside of Anger Written and directed by Mike Binder A New Line release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse

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