The Upside of Anger
Length: 1 hour, 58 minutes
Studio: New Line Features
Website: http://www.upsideofanger.com/
Release Date: 2005-03-18
Cast: Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Mike Binder, Erika Christensen, Alicia Witt
Director: Mike Binder
Screenwriter: Mike Binder
Music Score: Alexander Desplat
WorkNameSort: The Upside of Anger
Our Rating: 1.00
An afternoon special for edge-averse desperate housewives – or just a meandering sitcom that muffs the “com” – HBO alumnus Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger strands yet another terrific Joan Allen performance in thematically self-contradicting twaddle. Allen plays Terry, a heavy-drinking, upper-middle-class wreck with four daughters who’s made more distraught when her husband blows town. Terry falls for a slothfully charming, alcoholic talk show host (Kevin Costner, reminding us why we once found him nearly tolerable), makes a drunken fool of herself at a wedding, etc., until she eventually learns a psychologically dishonest answer to the title’s implied question – via a plot twist, telegraphed from the first shot, that we’ve been praying wouldn’t actually happen. Still, Upside does finally offer a believable reason for the invasion of Iraq: It’s something colorful for the movie’s upscale characters to get bored watching on TV in frequent, utterly irrelevant in-film broadcasts.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2005.