The Upside of Anger movie review (2005)
Hadley (Alicia Witt) is a cool, centered college student; Andy (Erika Christensen) reacts as second children often do, by deciding she will not be Hadley and indeed will accept an offer to be an intern on Denny's radio show -- an offer extended enthusiastically by Shep (Binder), the 40ish producer, who is a shameless letch. Emily (Keri Russell) is at war with her mother; she wants to be a dancer, and her mother says there's no money or future in it. Popeye (Evan Rachel Wood) is the youngest, but maturing way too rapidly, like Wood's character in "Thirteen."
Terry deals imperfectly with events in the lives of her daughters, such as Hadley's impending marriage and Andy's becoming Shep's girlfriend. Although Terry is wealthy, stylish and sexy -- a thoroughbred temporarily out of training -- she has a rebel streak maybe left over from her teens in the late 1970s. At a lunch to meet Hadley's prospective in-laws, she tells Denny, "I was like a public service ad against drinking."
It is inevitable that Denny and Terry will become lovers. The girls like him. He is lonely, and Terry's house feels more like home than his own, where the living room is furnished primarily by boxes of baseballs. It is also true, given the current state of drunk driving laws, that alcoholics are wise to choose lovers within walking distance. So the movie proceeds with wit, intelligence and a certain horrifying fascination. Sometimes Terry picks up the phone to call the creep in Sweden, but decides not to give him the satisfaction.
And then comes an unexpected development. Because "The Upside of Anger" opened a week earlier in New York than here, I am aware of the despair about this development from A.O. Scott in the New York Times (the ending "is an utter catastrophe") and Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal (the ending is "a cheat").
They are mistaken. Life can contain catastrophe, and life can cheat. The ending is the making of the movie, its transcendence, its way of casting everything in a new and ironic light, causing us to reevaluate what went before, and to regard the future with horror and pity. Without the ending, "The Upside of Anger" is a wonderfully made comedy of domestic manners. With it, the movie becomes larger and deeper. When life plays a joke on you, it can have a really rotten sense of humor.
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