Upside of Anger in no downer

Misplaced anger is a problem that affects many people. Lots of times in life people get so frustrated, so annoyed by their situation, that they unleash at whatever is nearest.

Mike Binder’s The Upside of Anger is all about the rash tension that strains his characters into becoming who they are. Each of his characters has his or her own feelings and emotions, capabilities to do wrong or right, and opinion on every situation in the movie.

I love movies where multiple characters get the spotlight allowing the audience to further associate with them. When that happens, a family dinner can be interesting and complex, as they often are in real-life, as opposed to stoic dialogue in which the audience cannot feel the importance of their being.

Mike Binder allows us to sympathize with the feelings of each character and the feelings they have toward each other, which provides much more material than claptrap.

The story focuses on a group of five women -- the mother (Joan Allen) and her four daughters. They share a common problem of being abandoned by their husbands without a word or notice. The mother, Terry (Allen), assumes that her husband moved off to Sweden with his young Swedish secretary. The rage, heartbreak, and pain that she feels after the dissolution of her marriage is the fuel for her ticked-off perspective toward the world.

With her husband now gone, Denny (Kevin Costner), a former baseball player and current deejay, tries to move in. His character is one of my favorites -- the good-intentioned alcoholic. Watching Denny chase after Terry is great fun, and they have a strange but appropriate chemistry to them.

As one might expect from the title, The Upside of Anger certainly has no shortage of anger. In fact, there is so much that some critics have felt that Binder’s intelligent film is misogynistic. In my opinion, Binder creates plenty of reason for the women to act the way they do, not in a way that looks down upon them. Admittedly, the anger seems to shoot out at every direction but not in a misogynistic way, possibly misanthropic, though.

The Upside of Anger is full of wonderful performances and characters. Allen and Costner play the perfect Terry and Denny. I enjoyed watching them react to each other on screen. Is it just me or was Costner just born to play a washed-up baseball player? Because he certainly wasn’t born to play “The King.”

The movie is full of dramatic situations and crises. It’s understandable that a family could experience such animosity in such eventful times. Watching the family members cope with their problems is what in the end makes The Upside of Anger work as a film.

Their family might not be perfect, but to quote Denny, “At least it’s real.”