In The Upside of Anger Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen), a well-to-do suburban mother of four, becomes prey to unmanageable anger when her husband appears to have run off with his secretary. Terry is in some sense a prisoner of her class. She wanted to be a poet when she was young but her parents demurred and so she married a steady man and raised her daughters. The girls are now either in high school or college and she pushes them--roughly, in her newly embittered mood--toward the stability she insists is the only viable option (just when the bottom seems to have fallen out of it for her). The daughter who narrates the movie says that before her husband's disappearance Terry was the sweetest person anyone knew. But this is what we see: having lost the prop of her comfortable, orderly life, Terry lets the discipline that has enabled her to play her part in that life become tainted by her turbulent emotions. Terry is a control freak but her efforts to control the situation actually broaden the zone of disorder around her.

We watch Terry's daughters watch their mother and it's both painfully and comically clear that as head of the household Terry can't distinguish sensible concerns from mere assertions of will. She's trying to maintain her identity as a loving mother in a setting in which she barely knows how to find satisfaction, but she's also acting out the resentment she can't expel or metabolize. She takes charge when called upon but mostly she sits in front of the TV drinking; she also randomly takes up with Denny (Kevin Costner), an affably pickled neighbor who is a former baseball star and current radio d.j.

Structurally the movie is an example of observational realism, telling us what this particular woman does in the given strange circumstances. It also shrewdly suggests the ways in which her daughters, who see her crisis as an infuriating and embarrassing sideshow, have inherited or picked up some of the sharply insistent corners of her personality. (This insistence is a debility, but it also contributes to Terry's regal-suburban style.) At the same time, the movie approaches realism ironically; by constant reference to her bottomless highball glass and its effects on her erratic, pressurized emotions, the movie keeps from rationalizing Terry's anger. The irony also enables the movie to channel our discomfort at Terry's meltdown, and the potential for pathos in her situation as an abandoned mother, into openly funny comedy. (The realism gives the movie body while the irony gives it wit.) None of the humor was lost on the Friday-night multiplex audience I saw the movie with.

Subtlety, it appears, is not a prerequisite for complexity. In The Upside of Anger, with its slam-bang comic shaping, complexity comes instead from the frankness that the ironic approach to realism permits. Irony is the narrative artist's means of expressing a disenchanted outlook. Realism is the great modern genre of sympathetic imagination. (As such, it makes more sense to talk about realistic characters as if they were real people than the characters of any other genre.) In combination irony and realism allow you to identify with the characters while keeping your romantic projections in check.