Starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, and Mike Binder

Maybe the problem is mine.  I crave movies about the genuine, secret world of girlhood.  But then when I see something that purports to be just that, it feels fake.

Everything about the sisters in “The Upside of Anger” is contrived.  They’re all beautiful.  They lay across each other’s beds and chat.  They congregate in the kitchen and have all their meals together.  Each has a nicely packaged theme and problem, and outside of that they have no friends or interests.  There’s The Dancer (Keri Russell), and mommy doesn’t want her to go to dance school.  She develops a cough and we all know what that means.  There’s The Reporter (Erika Christensen), who wants a job instead of college.  Then there’s The College One (Alicia Witt) and, well, she’s at college most of the time.  Yes, there’s even The Quiet One (Evan Rachel Wood).  They say things like “lame” and “you’re such a mental.”  I guess I expected a little too much linguistically from a movie with the word “upside” in its title.  I’d say the girls talk like they’re from the WB but then I’d actually have to watch the WB.  By the end of the movie there have been so many loaded glances, important nods, and warm laughter between them and their mother.  Then they end by sitting in a row and assuming the Strong Women Staring at the Middle Distance pose.

I don’t even know what I mean by fake.  Regular visitors to my site should know I’m not a stickler for realism.  Maybe writer-director Mike Binder based his idea of girlhood on reading those shiny magazines that are basically giant advertisements for cosmetics. About the only genuine thing about the girls is the narration The Quiet One provides to bookend the movie.  Unfortunately, it sounds exactly like the narration a 15-year-old would write (ug), and it isn’t exactly necessary either.

Anyway, they aren’t what the movie is about.  The movie is really about their mother (Joan Allen, good but a little overly facial), whose husband has just left her without a word.  She takes up drinking, being bitter, and turning off that filter which keeps our feet out of our mouths.  Under the circumstances, this seems a reasonable thing to do.  But she doesn’t know when to stop.  Days turn to weeks turn to months turn to years.  She’s still making everyone walk on eggshells around her while she “tells it the way it is.”  She still wants that special treatment after everyone’s sick of it.  Grieving is a lot like a birthday card:  we’re not quite sure when to get rid of it.

Unsure whether he wants to court her or just help her through this delicate period is the neighborhood loser, a former baseball star turned radio personality.  He’s played by Kevin Costner as a shambling, grinning, slow-talking, pot-smoking dope who’s drunk most of the time.  He always seems to be a few pages behind everyone else and not terribly concerned about catching up.  Costner the actor has apparently finally given up on being a traditional lead and has decided to work his way through Hollywood’s middle-aged beauties, including Joan Allen and Rene Russo.  He is not as washed up as the character he plays in “The Upside of Anger,” but he knows the score, and he’s fun.  He talks straight with Allen and they drink a lot.  Their scenes are pretty good.  They have a bit where they stop traffic to argue.  It’s kind of stupid, but he does the best he can.

The family of Pretty White People With Problems is joined by a token ugly person, played by troll-shaped writer-director Mike Binder.  He’s Costner’s radio producer and he gives The Reporter a job at his radio station, basically because she looks like Erika Christensen and he wants to hit on her.  When confronted by The Mom he makes a pretty good case for why older men want to take out younger women.  We actually kind of sympathize with him—that is, until Costner needs a victory to complete his character arc.  At which point Binder’s producer turns conveniently into an even bigger scumbag by switching to the worst possible motive for being with The Reporter.

So things are pretty good with the movie’s A couple, until the daughters show up and everyone goes off the handle and starts yelling.  Then it all feels so “lame” like it was written by “a total mental.”  There’s also the end of the movie, which involves a “Usual Suspects”-style twist.  In and of itself, it’s interesting, but after laboring over so much character psychology during the bulk of the movie, the psychic results of this revelation are left disappointingly unexamined.  I won’t say anymore, except that the reaction of the family to this revelation is kind of creepy and amazingly selfish, when you think about it.  “The Upside of Anger” is a little too concerned with closing off everyone’s circle nicely to notice.  If my vagueness sickens you, read the spoiler section at the bottom.

But my wife had a good time with “The Upside of Anger.”  She also thought the narration at the beginning and the end was atrocious but she didn’t mind the girls so much.  And I liked that nothing blew up, and no one got machine-gunned, and, if any clergymen had shown up, it would be to discuss marriage and not vaporize demons with buckets of holy water.

Scroll down to read the spoilers section for “The Upside of Anger.”

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SPOILERS!

The big twist is that The Dad has not abandoned his family but has fallen in a well and died.  His body is not discovered for, like, three years.  Time is kind of vague in “The Upside of Anger.”  This could have been a fascinating development because it means he’s not the person they all thought he was.  Apparently they thought him capable of leaving them, but he didn’t.  The lives they’ve built up for three years surround a mistake.  Think of “Mystic River,” in which the wife becomes convinced her husband is a murderer, but then he isn’t.  Think “Solaris,” in which the scientist’s dead wife is brought back to life, but only how he remembers her, and not how she really was.

It’s the reverse of what Audrey Tautou said in “A Very Long Engagement,” about how she’d rather think of her fiancé as living with another woman than dead in the trenches.  It’s the reverse of what happens in so many stories:  a mother will tell her child that “daddy’s dead” rather than admit that his father is living with a cocktail waitress in Vegas or Darth Vader.

The creepy part of “The Upside of Anger” is that, besides a few moments of stone faces at the funeral and watching The Mom cry, everyone is mostly, well, happy.  They’re so happy that they don’t have to live with their anger anymore.  They’ve all been basically self-centered through the entire movie, but this is a new low.  No guilt for having believed Dad did something so terrible for so long.  No guilt for feeling so happy that he’s dead, the way relatives will often feel guilty about being relieved when long comatose family members finally die.

Obviously he must not have been that great of a father and a husband if his family could believe him capable of abandoning them.  But there’s a difference between dealing with a struggling father and not feeling bad when a parent dies.  It’s as if Desdemona died of natural causes a few days before Othello planned on murdering her, and then years later he found out she was true after all.  Do you think he would cry for a couple minutes and then say “that’s such great news, now I don’t have to carry around all this negative energy!”  No, the Moor would probably impale Iago on a church steeple, take up some self-flagellation, proclaim Desdemona’s innocence to the world, and then maybe throw himself off a cliff.

None of this occurs to “The Upside of Anger,” because the women all need to show the middle distance how strong they are by staring at it in unison.


Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night

Finished Monday, April 11th, 2005