The Upside of Anger -- Rhinotainment

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Date Posted: 20:34:22 04/21/05 Thu
Author: The Rhino
Subject: The Upside of Anger

I am lucky to have grown up with the same parents I was born with. They didn't always get along and there were times when I felt that divorce was imminent but somehow they stuck it out and have held up as a couple for more than 30 years. They love each other still. I am thankful for that, especially after seeing the broken home story that is The Upside of Anger.

Joan Allen, arguably one of the best actresses or actors on the planet, plays the scorned wife of an alleged adulterer. She returns home one day to find neither hide nor hair of him. All of his things are in their rightful places but he is gone daddy gone. She believes him to have left the country with his secretary, leaving her with three teenage daughters and a pre-college graduate to take care of. She seethes with anger and jealousy, taking her anger out on her daughters and several bottles of vodka.

Kevin Costner plays a familiar role in this film as a former pro baseball player who has happily left his sport's glory days behind him and now just wants to drink and talk about anything but baseball on his local radio show. He also happens to be a friend of Allen's estranged husband. Secretly, he's always had a crush on Allen and begins to carve a path to her broken heart.

His path, however, is littered with a teenager who's in love with a sexually confused pot-smoking boy, another teenager who's in love with a middle-aged womanizer, another teenager who's in love with the idea of being a ballerina and nowhere near in love with the idea of going to a proper college and a college graduate who is pregnant and engaged to a guy whom the family has never met. He manages to act as damage control while Allen unconsciously breaks down their dreams and desires out of her own anger over a life that passed her by.

The film culminates in a rather brilliant twist of an ending, one that changes the entire story of the film in the most unusual of ways. Mike Binder wrote and directed the film, also co-starring as said womanizer. I don't care for Binder's acting nor am I a big fan of guys who put themselves in their movies (paging Mike White), but one thing I can say about Binder is that the roles he writes for himself are pretty self-deprecating and his character usually ends up looking like a fool. For that, I give him a mulligan.

Fantastic film. Allen has never been better, nor has Costner. He returns to the form that won over the hearts of movie lovers years ago. Who can fault a guy for wanting to expand his horizons and try different things. But when those different things are Waterworld and The Postman, maybe one should consider going back to a working formula (see Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, A Perfect World and Tin Cup for details).

Highly Recommended

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