The Upside of Anger
Directed by Mike Binder.
Starring Joan Allen, Kevin Costner.
Terry Wolfmeyer wakes up one morning to find her husband gone. She phones the office and finds that, surprise surprise, her husband’s attractive Swedish secretary has just resigned and gone back to Sweden. With his obvious infidelity and desertion weighing heavily on her mind, Terry dives headlong into a drunken, sullen, bitchy, nasty, fog that sets in for the entire three or so years of the film’s span.
Luckily for Terry, on the first day of her drunken, sullen, bitchy, nasty, decline, Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), a retired pro baseball star, drops in to chat with her husband. He finds Terry getting drunk and feeling very sorry for herself. They form a friendship based on mutual drunkenness and Denny’s genuine good humour.
Meanwhile, Terry’s four daughters have to deal with their father’s complete absence as they grow through the next couple of years without him. It is especially hard for them without his support in their battles to assert themselves over their domineering, and often drunk, mother.
The four actresses playing Terry’s daughters are the best elements in this film. They deftly portray young women trying to get on with their lives in unfortunate circumstances. With the youngest still in high school, the eldest about to graduate from university, they are all struggling to come to terms with suddenly finding themselves in a “broken home.” Unfortunately, their vast acting skills and their warm portrayal of their characters can’t save this film from being completely dominated by Joan Allen’s unsympathetic portrayal of the nasty Terry. It is evident from the beginning of the film that we are meant to feel some kind of sympathy for her, but she is so nasty and domineering with her daughters, and so completely oblivious to their pain at their father’s leaving, that it’s impossible to feel any sympathy for her at all.
The Upside of Anger gives the impression that it’s meant to be a movie that leaves you all warm and fuzzy, that it’s meant to be a film about growing through adversity, but it never hits the mark.
I give it a 1 out of 5.
Esther Speight
