Joan Allen in Mike Binder's The Upside of Anger: Pick Your Poison - Page 3

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.

And, like Leaving Las Vegas, The Upside of Anger provides a galvanizing turn for its star--a daring alloy of pungent misery and jaw-dropping antics. Allen became a minor prestige star playing put-upon wives in Nixon, The Ice Storm, and Pleasantville; her characters were presented in terms of pathos, calling on her impressive stage technique within a very limited range. As she sketched them, these woebegone ladies were overdelineated rather than shaded. (She was suppler in her lead role as a principled-but-tough politico in The Contender, but everything was undermined by the shaping of the central issue, her character's sexual history, for maidenly melodrama; click here for my comments.)

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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