“You’re just like everyone else in my life,” says Terry Wolfmeyer, an easily rattled Michigan mother whose husband has just left her in “The Upside of Anger.” “You need to pay closer attention to me.”
Terry, played with chilly me-me-me authority by Joan Allen, is speaking to one of her four daughters, who has apparently landed in the hospital because mom’s erratic behavior stresses her out.
“Be nice,” says another daughter. “It’s not in my nature,” declares Terry. No kidding. She’s a tough character to spend a couple of hours with — especially when you consider that most of her problems are solved in the opening reel.
Although we’re assured repeatedly that Terry was a sweetheart before her marriage went to hell, there’s not much evidence of that in the movie. She drinks heavily, retreats to bed, declares herself a wreck, alienates her kids and keeps her distance from a friendly neighbor, Denny Davies (Kevin Costner), who wants to be her drinking buddy — and more.
He puts up with all the tensions because he apparently needs a little midlife drama, and this readymade family looks like the most promising next chapter in his life. He’s a retired baseball player (an old photograph that’s used to establish his career is taken from one of Costner’s baseball movies, “For the Love of the Game”), and Costner makes him so amiable and understanding that you wonder why it takes Terry so long to realize that he’s Mr. Right.
The movie takes two full hours to arrive at a conclusion that seems obvious from the beginning. For all the verbal battles between Denny and Terry, between Terry and her daughters, between Terry and her daughters’ boyfriends, there are few surprises here.
One of the daughters gets pregnant before she marries, another takes up with an older man, and another attaches herself to an inappropriate partner, but their relationships don’t carry much dramatic weight. Indeed, the daughters are nearly interchangeable, and that’s not the fault of four capable actresses who are required to deliver far too many platitudes. As written, the daughters are mostly cartoons; one of them is even burdened with the nickname, “Popeye.”
All that really matters is whether Terry and Denny will get together, whether she can forget her anger at her missing husband, and whether Denny can put up with her bouts of self-destructiveness. The nimble professionalism of Costner and Allen is almost enough to make up for the movie’s sitcom glibness. Both actors at their most resourceful here, effectively making three-dimensional people out of caricatures.
Mike Binder, the creator-star of HBO’s much-panned 2001 comedy, “The Mind of the Married Man,” wrote and directed “The Upside of Anger” and plays a substantial supporting role: Shep Goodman, a slobbish radio producer who seduces one of the daughters and isn’t very good at keeping Denny’s radio show on-track.
He’s remarkably charming in the role, but then so are all the men in the movie. Call it the “Spanglish” syndrome. It’s the women who can’t shake their neuroses, especially Allen’s Terry, who tests the limits of Denny’s patience in the grotesquely dramatic final scenes.