Joan Allen in Mike Binder's The Upside of Anger: Pick Your Poison - Page 4

In The Upside of Anger, by contrast, Allen's theatrical control helps establish Terry's character and enables the actress to come up with seemingly endless variations on female wrath. Drawing on every technical resource at her command, down to the cords in her long neck, Allen slams through the picture and even its episodicness becomes an asset because you can't guess what madness Terry will succumb to next. There are drawbacks to Allen's craft-consciousness. For instance, after Terry has had a particularly unpleasant exchange with her dancer-daughter, the tight way she re-enters the room and tells the girl to set the table is too pointed in its effect. Allen won't follow wherever Terry's turmoil might take her; as an actress she perhaps has as many control issues as Terry. But in The Upside of Anger the plusses cancel out the minuses in profusion; it's a landmark performance.

You can find this review and a lot besides at The Kitchen Cabinet.

Alan Dale is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies of the 1990s and Comedy Is a Man in Trouble: Slapstick in American Movies.

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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