The Upside of Anger

Lush life: American cinema scores another shallow navel-gazer with The Upside of Anger

By Jeannette Catsoulis

Whatever mommie issues American filmmakers are dragging around these days, seeing them worked out on our movie screens is becoming a bit of a chore. In recent months we've observed Téa Leonie in Spanglish and Sigourney Weaver in Imaginary Heroes selfishly obsess over their own miseries while their neglected offspring bond with others or simply kill themselves. After suffering through Joan Allen's travails in The Upside of Anger, I may join them.

Writer-director Mike Binder--the still-at-large perpetrator of HBO's excruciating "Mind of a Married Man"--wrote the film for Allen, a superb actress of such prominent intelligence and aggressive bone structure few leading men will climb into bed with her. Distracted by her fierce cheekbones and regal bearing, directors like to thrust her into asexual, steely roles like Pat Nixon in Nixon or Elizabeth Proctor in The Crucible. Meanwhile her sensuality, difficult to extract, is often falsely presumed missing (as proven by her smoldering turn in the upcoming drama, Off the Map).

The character of Terry Wolfmeyer, abandoned spouse and brittle mother to four teenage daughters, is another depressing example of a director playing to the surface with neither the wit nor the skill to delve deeper. Allen tackles her with everything she's got, and it's to her credit that the character becomes more than the script demands: not just angry about her husband's defection--to Sweden, with his assistant, Terry believes--but also fearful, insecure, and jealous of her daughters' unexplored lives. Her gaunt frame draped in a succession of chiffon nighties, Terry staggers around her suburban Detroit home with a bottle of Grey Goose and a pack of Marlboros surgically attached to her mouth. In the kitchen, her four self-sufficient daughters--all good actresses playing one-note characters--plot a variety of rebellions, including attending ballet school (Keri Russell) and becoming a baby machine (Alicia Witt).

Awash in fury and self-pity, Terry barely notices when retired baseball hero Denny Davies (Kevin Costner, returning to the fictional profession that's been most lucrative for him) starts sniffing around. An ex-Detroit Tiger with a mediocre radio show and a sideline selling autographed balls, Denny is permanently sloshed and hence immune to Terry's bipolar mood swings. (And there's something undeniably comic in the sight of Allen, all elbows and collarbones, being romanced by the soft-bellied, cushiony Costner.) But Denny is Terry's soft place to fall: lodged on her couch beside the family dog, he's as hard to expel as an infestation of fleas.

Decorated with ethereal voiceovers supplied by youngest daughter, Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood, bearing no obvious resemblance to Gene Hackman), The Upside of Anger suffers from more than just a god-awful title. Arriving in the midst of a crop of recent American film-festival favorites--The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Melinda and Melinda, Imaginary Heroes--it has become painfully clear that American filmmakers need to get their heads out of their navels. The inability of American film to look beyond this country and its familial difficulties is becoming increasingly stifling and solipsistic. Compared to the astonishing variety of topics addressed by foreign filmmakers in works like Head-On (Germany), Walk On Water (Israel), and the astonishing Nobody Knows (Japan), The Upside of Anger is just American Beauty lite--another day, another kitchen sink.