BEFORE: Joan Allen carries over from "Death Race", to a film that I'm not quite sure how to handle, because it seems rather relationshippy, if not outright romance-y. That usually would reserve a film for February, however I tried other outros from the Jason Statham block, and this was really the only one that worked, in that it gets me to Easter in the proper time frame. If I read the signals correctly, this film does NOT connect to anything else on the romance list, so it's OK to split this one off from the herd, otherwise it's just going to sit on the watchlist for a few more years maybe, or never get watched at all.
I've also just realized it's a prime candidate for a Mother's Day film, perhaps similar to "Because I Said So" or "Lovely and Amazing", which were both about families with several teen/twenty-something females and their relationships to their mother. So this film is arriving either two weeks too late for the romance chain or two months early for Mother's Day, I can't really tell before I watch it, but I really need it for the linking so I'm going to just watch it and hope the chain knows what it's doing.
THE PLOT: When her husband unexpectedly disappears, a sharp-witted suburban wife and her daughters juggle their mom's romantic dilemmas and family dynamics.
AFTER: Yeah, it's kind of what I figured, I don't know what to do with this film, like forget putting it in the right category, I want to know where the heck this story came from, like is this based on a book or a true story, did all of this really happen to a Detroit family with four teen daughters, or is it all just a made-up story meant to make some kind of point about life, and if so, what is that? Apparently this all comes from the mind of writer/director Mike Binder, but Kevin Costner's ex-baseball player is believed to be based on retired Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, who had a radio talk show but maybe didn't like to talk about his baseball career all that much. Think of that as maybe an early example of a podcast, then, one where the host can talk about whatever he wants, because it's not like the audience has any say in the matter. Any way you slice it, though, this definitely feels like a mortar-type film, there's no way this is a brick, even if I'd scheduled it on Mother's Day, that might have made it a little more relevant and topical, but I'm guessing still it's more valuable to me as a film that links other films together and keeps the chain going.
The poster finishes the title "The Upside of Anger" with "is the person you can become." And I have no idea what that is supposed to mean. Anger is a good thing because it turns you into a different person? Certainly not a happier person, but I guess an angrier person is technically the same person, just angrier. Right? Like I can have a lot of emotions, angry or sad or ecstatic or regretful, but I'm STILL ME. The upside of anger is the person you can become - it feels like one of those phrases that you might overhear and it will bounce around your brain for a couple hours before you scream, "No, it's fucking NOT, that doesn't make any sense." Lewis Black once said this after overhearing someone say, "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college..." and you can probably go crazy thinking about what that sentence might mean.
The movie starts off with a funeral, but it fails to mention who is being buried - we can eliminate a couple of the characters because they're seen AT the funeral, but the identity of the corpse is going to remain secret for most of the movie. Then the movie flashes back three years to Terry Wolfmeyer telling her four daughters that their father has left the family, most likely to live with his younger secretary in Sweden. Terry starts to drink heavily to cope with her anger and pain, and when she confides in her husband's friend and their neighbor Denny, they start to drink together. Spending time together, though, even if they're mismatched, well, we all know where this can lead - but Terry is still going through the stages of grief.
The meat of the film is about Terry's relationship with her four daughters - Hadley, Emily, Andy and Popeye - and how that relationship is affected by their father's absence, their mother dealing with that absence, and also her budding relationship with Denny. Denny's never been a father figure before, but is willing to take a stab at it - as a former baseball player maybe he's dated a bunch of MLB groupies and might finally be ready for a real relationship, later in life. Stranger things have happened.
Hadley graduates from college and then introduces her mother to her boyfriend of three years, only to reveal that she is pregnant, and they are engaged. Terry reacts with anger because all of this is being sprung on her kind of after the fact, and she embarrasses herself at a luncheon with her future in-laws because she is having trouble dealing with the influx of all this news and change. Emily, the second daughter, wants to pursue a career as a ballet dancer, only her mother makes her go to U. Michigan in Ann Arbor and pursue something more traditional. But when she is hospitalized for some kind of eating disorder, caused by stress, she comes home to recover and (eventually) Terry accepts her decision to pursue dance as a career. She had to get there the hard way, though, nearly everything in the film seems to move in that direction.
Andy, another daughter, accepts a job from Denny at the radio station where he has his talk show, his producer, Shep, is reluctant to hire her at first, but then is attracted to her, so he has her producing radio shows while he's also sleeping with her, that's probably an H.R. violation, even back in 2005, but people became more aware about such things later on. Meanwhile, Popeye pursues a relationship with her high-school classmate while she makes documentary films, but after she kisses him, he tells her that he's gay, and she doesn't want to believe it. It happens, sure, and what high-school girl couldn't use a gay male best friend? Gorden's dad likes bungee jumping and he claims to like it too, but I think this was just a big fad back in 2005, anyway I don't think anybody LIKES it, so I really don't understand why this was ever a thing.
Also meanwhile, Terry and Denny have kind of an on-again, off-again thing going on, they have sex but then they don't know where to take things next, like marriage is probably off the table, but why not just try to enjoy it for whatever it is? Terry wants to micro-manage the relationship just like she does with her daughter's lives, and that's probably very annoying. Terry gets mad at him over the whole thing with her daughter dating his older radio producer, but then when she and Denny separate for a while, she finds that she misses him, and they get back together. Denny just likes being some part of this big family, coming over for very delicious dinners, and giving advice to the daughters when he can. Sure this life's not perfect, but then nothing is.
There's a final twist to the story, and it's got a lot to do with that funeral from the opening, but I'm not going to spoil it here. Whether the twist is believable or not, well I suppose that's up to you. I guess maybe this is all about how our anger and frustration over things not happening the way we would like them to is probably the simplest reaction we could have, but is being angry really the best way to spend our time, or is it a lot of misplaced and sometimes unnecessary emotion? Sorry, that's really all I have tonight, the film doesn't even connect the dots that well in trying to have some meaningful words of advice for all the folks at home. Would that really be so much to ask for here?
Directed by Mike Binder (director of "Reign Over Me")
Also starring Kevin Costner (last seen in "3 Days to Kill"), Erika Christensen (last seen in "Swimfan"), Keri Russell (last seen in "Austenland"), Alicia Witt (last seen in "Citizen Ruth"), Evan Rachel Wood (last seen in "The Life Before Her Eyes"), Mike Binder (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Tom Harper, Dane Christensen, Danny Webb (last seen in "The Dig"), Magdalena Manville (last seen in "Monster' (2003)), Suzanne Bertish (last seen in "The Wife"), David Firth, Rod Woodruff, Stephen Greif (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Arthur Penhallow, Richard Mylan, Robert Perkins, William Tapley (last heard in "V for Vendetta"), Owen Oakeshott, Bella Sabbagh, Gavin Munn
RATING: 5 out of 10 wedding band songs
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