Joan Allen in Mike Binder's The Upside of Anger: Pick Your Poison - Page 2

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.

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.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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