There is a degree of fantasy in The Upside of Anger--Terry's bad behavior is more extreme than we would probably let ourselves get away with under stress--but it's not self-flattering fantasy. Watching Terry we can thus fantasize and still be honest with ourselves. The very cracks in Terry's personality, the fact that she carries her wounded feelings into every situation without self-consciousness, make her a large character. Not heroic, any more than Bette Davis's wrongheaded protagonists in the '30s and '40s were, but titanic in some sense. (She's the kind of mother it's impossible to end run.) The irony prevents us from admiring Terry, but there is an element of awe in watching her battle against herself in a situation we, too, may have experienced, because she loses the battle with a panache we can probably only dream about having.

The script, by the director Mike Binder (who also expertly plays a supporting role as the much-older lover of one of the daughter's), is not, unfortunately, all of a piece. The lowest-grade fault is that by opening on Terry and Denny at a funeral, the movie gets energy from a tawdry form of suspense: we're constantly on the lookout for hazards to the characters' lives and limbs. The movie also spends a good deal of time on the daughters, whose episodic stories are treated in a more romanticized form of realism than their mother's. This is especially true of the daughter who wants, over Terry's dead body, to study dance at an arts college.

On the other hand, the other three girls' stories are better shaped, and it helps that they bring in more characters for Terry to react to. Her reactions run from slapstick sputtering over a household mishap to a manically awkward first meal with future in-laws (in which Terry's behavior is so spectacularly bad even she has to admit it) to a shockingly brutal confrontation at a wedding party. (The overall irony is what unifies this array of reactions.) The engagement lunch party, in which Terry is so agitated and swozzled she can't extricate herself from the bomb crater her opening comments create, is a comic dream of a nightmare, in which your cringing makes you laugh harder. And in the violent wedding party sequence, Binder, as Terry's victim, gives her a muted tongue-lashing worthy of her assault on him, which is amazing because he matches her force with lines in a totally different comic idiom. Together these two sequences instantly qualify for an anthology of high style in American movies.

The final, and most peculiar, failure of the script is that what the narrating youngest daughter says in explanation of the title, that the upside of anger is the person it makes of you, is presented as wisdom but doesn't summarize Terry's story. Rather, the surprise explanation of her husband's disappearance emphasizes the futility of Terry's anger, the way in which we choose anger to express our feelings over the things we can't help. This ironic view ties The Upside of Anger to Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas, which likewise uses booze to get at the comedy in tragedy--the clownishness with which we waste our lives.