The Upside of Anger
Terry Ann Wolfmeyer pushes her grocery cart up the liquor aisle (in Michigan, as I recently discovered, you can buy hooch in the grocery store), and she stops at the Grey Goose vodka. She puts one bottle in her cart, then another. She pauses. Will she put one back? No. With exquisite timing, she snags another bottle and hurries out of the frame.
“The Upside of Anger” follows Terry (Joan Allen) through a tremendously entertaining and touching three-year bender, enabled by her next-door neighbor, Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), an alcoholic former major leaguer who refuses to talk baseball on his radio talk show. Writer-director Mike Binder’s movie is lively, rounded and true, with an unforced vitality and homespun wit. Terry’s anger stems from the unexpected departure of her cheating husband, who disappears just as his Swedish secretary moves back to her homeland. Coincidence? Terry thinks not. Money’s not much of an issue for the Wolfmeyers, who live in a posh Detroit suburb, but Terry has to fend alone with her four college- and high school-age daughters (Alicia Witt, Erika Christensen, Keri Russell and Evan Rachel Wood), who largely internalize the trauma of losing their father, taking it out on their mom in subtle ways that make perfect sense. Binder writes female characters with offhand confidence; in the DVD commentary, he asserts that “men and women aren’t that different.” But he also casts himself as the least appealing character — Denny’s sleazy, ratlike radio producer — to leaven the mother-daughter tension with some accessible battle-of-the-sexes humor.
This movie is such a delight that, watching it nearly two years after its release in the spring of 2005, it makes me angry at New Line Cinema for not promoting it properly. This is the studio that, under former production chief Michael De Luca, was the most daring in Hollywood in the late 90s, making “American History X” and “Pleasantville” and “Dark City” and “Magnolia.” De Luca got canned after some expensive flops in 2001, and since then, with the exception of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, New Line seems to have no clue how to handle the occasional good movie it makes. (Consider “The New World,” dumped into unsuspecting multiplexes last January, or “Little Children,” which I still haven’t seen because New Line put it out in September but still hasn’t expanded its release, no many how many awards it’s nominated for.)
New Line did this movie wrong because there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been a hit. It seems to have garnered good word of mouth with no help from the studio, and no wonder — it’s honest and unpretentious and fun. Costner, pudgier and pastier than he’s ever been on film, is extraordinary as the groggy, lazy, self-aware Denny. He lets you see Denny’s sadness but doesn’t overdo the pathos. And, my goodness — any competent studio marketing department would have pushed Joan Allen for an Oscar nomination. She’s played a lot of repressed suburban housewives, but in “The Upside of Anger” she’s thrillingly manic and unhinged — as lifelike as she’s ever been. Terry is titanically flawed, but you feel privileged to get to know her. That’s great writing and acting.
(By the way, I rented “The Upside of Anger” after seeing a promising-looking trailer for Adam Sandler’s latest attempt at serious cinema, “Reign Over Me,” also written and directed by Binder. Sandler plays a man whose family was killed on 9/11; Don Cheadle befriends him. It seems Binder is one of few moviemakers willing to engage with the post-9/11 world; in “The Upside of Anger,” Terry and Denny bond by getting drunk and watching the invasion of Iraq on CNN.)