FOR AWHILE, a new movie called The Upside of Anger seems like a miracle. The film simply records the actions of the movie’s fierce and fascinating heroine, a well-to-do mother of four girls ranging in age from 15 to 22, as she falls to pieces. Suddenly abandoned by her husband, Terry Wolfmeyer spends all day in her silky negligee with a glass of Grey Goose vodka in her hand. She showers at 5:30 in the afternoon and leaves the cooking and cleaning to her daughters. She rants, she jokes, and she hurls withering glances at the girls if they do not respond as she wishes.
Since alcoholic misery loves company, Terry starts spending time with Denny Davies, a former major-league baseball starter turned radio talk-show host, who lives nearby. She’s a mean drunk. He’s a goofy and cheerful drunk. After awhile, they figure they should have an affair, but he panics and hides in his yard when she comes calling.
At one point, her daughters come upon Terry lying in bed, eyes open, unable to move even though she has to drive her youngest to school. She complains that she can’t bring herself to behave like the women going through divorces in television movies, who square their shoulders and get on with life.
Indeed, in an age when divorce is mostly played for laughs on the small and big screens, there’s something especially ennobling about the opening hour of The Upside of Anger. The movie takes Terry’s pain seriously. You believe it when she says that this is a heartbreak from which she can never recover–and you take Denny seriously, as well, when he says that she will rally but will always bear the emotional scars, that it will be like walking with a limp.
What makes The Upside of Anger‘s focus even more stunning is that there is only one other American movie I can recall that offers a comparably convincing portrait of a woman mired in grief and abandonment. Men Don’t Leave, which was released in 1990, features a remarkable Jessica Lange as a young widow who does indeed try to square her shoulders and get on with life, but halfway through the film falls prey to a paralyzing depression.
There’s a serious problem with trying to portray depression on film. How do you do it without making the movie a terrible downer? Men Don’t Leave couldn’t figure it out. It leaves one feeling almost as crushed as Jessica Lange’s character. The writer and director of The Upside of Anger, Mike Binder, succeeds where Men Don’t Leave fails because his movie is actually funny. Terry isn’t a very admirable person, but she is clever and sharp-tongued, and always seems to have something interesting and unexpected to say. The beautiful and usually recessive actress Joan Allen, who plays Terry, knows this is the part of a lifetime, and she tears into it like a female Pacino. She may go over the top a bit, may chew on the scenery here and there, but she’s so unrestrained and game you have to love her.
Allen is sensational, but it’s Kevin Costner who is the revelation here. In his first major role, in 1985’s Silverado, Costner played a rowdy firecracker of a cowboy. Then he became a leading man and all the life and vigor seemed to drain from his body. There’s never been a duller movie star, and it’s shocking to think that it’s been nearly 15 years since he made a picture anybody wanted to see (his last hit was, of all things, JFK). Maybe it took all that time and all that failure for the energy he showed in Silverado to return. This is an indelible comic portrayal of a classic American type: the pretty boy gone to seed, the amiable guy who’s lost his sense of purpose, the drunken stoner who’s still drinking and smoking pot while most everybody he’s known has embraced adulthood.
When the movie focuses on Terry and Denny, it’s really quite wonderful–and whenever writer-director Binder is on-screen in his secondary part as Denny’s slimy radio producer, it crackles as well. But something is off when The Upside of Anger concerns itself with Terry’s four daughters and her relationship with them. The girls don’t seem particularly affected one way or the other by their father’s disappearance or their mother’s drunkenness. The oldest dislikes Terry for other reasons that go unexplored. Another daughter supposedly acts out to get her mother’s goat, but because the part is poorly written and the actress playing her (Erika Christensen) so disastrously bad, her choices seem inexplicable. A third wants to be a dancer and Terry disapproves, but fortunately for her she becomes deathly ill so Terry gets nicer about it. The youngest just seems to be living in the house as a boarder, even though she is nominally the narrator of the film.
These are forgivable flaws. But what is not forgivable, what makes The Upside of Anger one of the most disappointing movies I can remember, is its ending. For it turns out that Terry’s husband hasn’t actually left her. Three years after the movie begins, Denny discovers that the poor fellow was taking a walk in some parkland behind their house, fell in a well, and died.
Everything about this plot twist–everything–is awful. It shatters any pretense that the world we’re seeing in The Upside of Anger bears any relation to the world we live in. In the first place, Mike Binder asks us to believe it never occurred to anyone that the husband’s disappearance might have been caused by an accident. Wouldn’t one of the daughters have thought to call the police, even if Terry didn’t? Don’t they have access to telephones and the Internet so that they could try to track their father down in Sweden (where Terry believes he has gone with a former secretary)?
Worse than that, though, is that, thematically, the plot twist invalidates everything we’ve seen before it. Terry’s anger at her missing husband is, it appears, entirely unfounded. Rather than having been the victim of a horrible injustice, she has done her husband a cosmic injustice. She’s not an admirable-but-confused woman; she’s a monster.
The movie’s final scene takes place after the husband’s funeral. No one sheds so much as a tear for the horrible death experienced by the unfairly maligned corpse. Not one of the daughters denounces her mother for her unparalleled cruelty. Denny does not flee from Terry as from the plague, which is what any normal person would do. No, they all hug and smile and find solace in each other as they sit in the backyard of the house, looking off into the spot where Mr. Wolfmeyer met his gruesome demise. We learn from a voiceover narration that anger is a very bad thing. It is to be avoided and rejected. But we are also told the “upside of anger” is that it “makes us into the people we become.”
There is one upside to the anger I experienced as the closing credits rolled. It convinced me to blow the surprise ending so that you could leave the theater after about an hour and 50 minutes. When you see Kevin Costner starting to walk into the backyard with a couple of contractors, get your coat and leave. You’ll think better of The Upside of Anger and not have the pleasures of seeing it damaged by the well-deserved contempt you’ll feel if you stay until the bitter end.
John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
