The Upside of Anger Review
by Matthew Montchalin (montch AT aracnet DOT com)April 26th, 2005
"Upside of Anger"
Well, right up front, if I'd known that this was going to be a chick flick along the lines of all those others that are already running on cable tv (think 'Lifetime' or 'Oxygen' channels) I might have thought twice before plunking down $5.25 at the economy hour, and going on in.
At the outset, it's about a lady whose millionaire 50-ish husband abandons her. -And along these lines, what's this we learn? He apparently prefers to run off with his young 20-ish secretary than spend the rest of his life with a shrill, hissing wife-bitch that sees only the negative side of life. (But where is the 'UP' side to life, that this movie takes its name from?) As for the missing husband, we never get to see him but for some family photos on the walls to his three-story million-dollar mansion. He's a family man, and posed next to his loving wife and his three or four wonderful daughters. Here a picture, there a picture, everywhere a picture-picture, but no real good closeups. What kind of man is he? Shouldn't we all be asking that question? After all, the camera just follows the abandoned wife through most of the movie, and we're supposed to be sympathetic to her plight. Aren't we walking in her footsteps, if not in her shoes? But of course, half an hour into the movie, she throws a shrieking tissy-fit and rips all of his pictures off all the walls. Boy, now THAT shows HIM!
So, the underlying question that continues to pain his adoring wife through the course of the movie is HOW on earth could he EVER abandon her, and leave EVERYTHING behind, just to be with his beautiful Swedish secretary??? (I couldn't help but wonder if this movie was going to take a sudden turn along the lines of "White Oleander" - one of the few other chick flicks I've accidentally seen at the theater. Did she secretly KILL her husband, or did someone else?)
Okay, so much for the underlying theme.
The rest of the movie is spent with the nextdoor neighbor, a disc jockey (or sports radio commentator that doesn't really want to talk about sports) that keeps coming on to the jilted housewife. Does he really want to talk about subdividing the south twenty, or is he really interested in starting up a brazenly blunt 'physical' relationship with her?
There's more boozing in THIS movie than in any other movie I've seen this year, including the award-winning 'Sideways.' It's hard liquor all the way, at least for this angry, jilted woman, and the disc-jockey that is coming on to her. If the movie doesn't take a hard turn to the left and touch on the theme of a man-hating mother in "White Oleander" maybe it would take a hard turn to the right and borrow some of the themes of a jilted girlfriend from Clint Eastwood's "Play Misty for Me" - - but here and there, as fate would have us follow it, we encounter a series of nearly comic situations, as if it were a comedy.
But that said, there are her four daughters with their own attempts to go on with their lives- There's the daughter who's on the verge of graduating from college, another daughter that wants to specialize in dance interpretation (but she finds herself having to specialize in ballet instead), and a daughter in high school that wants to make a boyfriend out of a new boy in town, but he would much rather go bungie-cord jumping than make out with her in her bedroom). And then there's the daughter that wants to be a radio announcer's assistant and finds her in a frankly physical relationship with her stubble-faced immediate superior. Now, how hard is that kind of a job going to be, aside from raising questions of sexual harassment and favoritism?
All in all, this kind of movie will be highly regarded by people already addicted to the Lifetime cabletv channel, where it is going to find itself playing someday, but the rest of us are going to find ourselves squirming and enduring, waiting for the movie to come to an end.
Camerawork: A+
Soundtrack: B
Sets and Props: A
Plot & Storyline D-
Car Chases: F (no car chases in THIS movie, folk, but there is a gratuitous traffic jam at an intersection) Explosions C- (bloody gore at a dinner table in a fantasy sequence)
Destruction C+ (don't bungie cord through people's picture windows, folks)
More on 'The Upside of Anger'...
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