Just as we did last week, today's Almost There was chosen by you, the reader. From a group of 2005 Oscar hopefuls, Joan Allen came out victorious for her work in The Upside of Anger. She got 25% of your votes, beating performances like Zhang Ziyi's watery Sayuri in Memoirs of a Geisha, Maria Bello's steamy turn in A History of Violence, and Scarlett Johansson's arresting Oscar bid in Match Point. All those actresses got closer to the gold than Allen realistically did, but she was still part of the conversation. After all, it's difficult to believe someone could watch The Upside of Anger and not want to shower its leading lady with accolades…
As beginnings go, The Upside of Anger doesn't have a very auspicious one. We open on the day of a funeral, the camera focusing on a WASP-y matriarch's stony expression as her younger daughter narrates over the action. The young girl speaks of all-consuming anger that took hold of her mother, a transformative force that soured what was, according to the kid, the sweetest person anyone who knew her had ever met. It's all a bit clichéd and maudlin too, an impression that doesn't fade as the narrative folds on itself and flashes back to three years before the burial. In that less mournful time, we meet the family again, all of them playing roles that one wouldn't be surprised to find on a puerile sitcom.
There're four vaguely undistinguishable daughters. One has professional aspirations, another wants to dance, while the oldest seems destined to domesticity after graduation. Our narrator is there too, a sullen teenager with an artistic streak and a wardrobe that couldn't be more mid-2000s if it tried. At the head of the clan, we find that matriarch again. Instead of grief-stricken blacks, she's wearing soft pastels, silk, and lace, a vision of suburbanite living lounging with a hard face and a glass in hand. Is this the woman whose sweetness was so dearly extolled by her kid? Hopelessly sozzled and furious, she sounds and looks more like the cartoon of a desperately unhappy housewife. It's enough to make one doubt Joan Allen's taste.
However, one should never doubt Joan Allen.
As the scene unfolds, we discover that the pater familias of the Wolfmeyer clan has disappeared. According to Terry, his raging wife, the husband absconded to Sweden with his secretary, abandoning his family without even a goodbye. As she tells this to her onscreen daughters, Allen enjoys lacing each word with venom, savoring the cruelty spewing from her mouth as if it was ambrosia from the Gods. It's a showy spectacle, broad and bold, but, the longer the moment stretches, the more we start to see hidden depths beneath the surface. No matter how combative Terry is, she's hurt, her soul bruised and her heart broken. Even as she bombards us with the character's aggressive stance, Allen lets us see the pain fueling the attack.
All that, and she's funny. With her ramrod straight posture and dramatic presence, Allen often sticks out like a sore thumb in every composition, drawing all the attention to herself while unbalancing the other actor's dynamics. As good as the actresses playing her daughters are, they often stand paralyzed in the presence of Allen. Maybe they're intimidated by her talent or perchance trying to show how this family is unprepared to deal with a mother who's decided to give up on life and drown her sorrows in equal parts booze and resentment. These contrasts create an overwhelming sense of awkwardness that's funny to see and the hilarity only increases when Allen starts firing perfectly timed one-liners like a diva of Old Hollywood.
Her anger's funny too, while also being varied. When dealing with her new paramour, a former baseball star played by Kevin Costner, she's amusingly abrasive, mixing her prickliness with a bit of flirtation. She can also be manic, showing the nervousness of a middle-aged woman tentatively reentering romantic life. However, when her daughters' happiness is on the line, any insecurity vanishes and her rage becomes the hostility of a proud lioness. The movie's most memorable and best joke makes full use of this carnivorous bloodthirst, by putting us inside Terry's head. While dining in the company of one of her daughter's boss/boyfriend, she imagines the man's head exploding. As his gooey remains paint everything, we see a rare, genuine, smile adorning her lips. Weirdly enough, in such scenes, it's easy to see the doting mother that existed before unexpected pains marred the picture.
The Upside of Anger is structured in a very fragmented manner, full of time jumps that make it difficult to track the characters' arcs. Because of that, it's doubly important that Allen dominate her modulating tones with discipline. Faced with such a task, the actress accomplishes it with seemingly no effort. She blithely floats through the narrative in a storm of emotions that are so strong they must stay partially hidden or else we might be singed. All of it feels natural, lived-in, organic eccentricity rather than the forced pantomime of a showboating performer. Even when the comedy tips over to melodrama, Allen's in control of everything, showing us the unraveling of Terry with as much piercing precision as her comedy. When a woman fueled by hatred sees herself robbed of even that, Allen plays it like a balloon losing its air, crying in gasps. It's mesmerizing.
Joan Allen turns pain into hilarity and makes comedy hurt, she's sexy like never before and über-charismatic to boot. Her performance as Terry Wolfmeyer is one of her crowning achievements and it's hard to see why it didn't make a bigger dent on the awards race. After all, Allen was at the top of her game, having just earned new fans thanks to the commercial triumph of The Bourne Supremacy, and her reviews were hardly ever better. Still, the most she got was a Critics Choice Award and a handful of regional prizes.
I'd rank her above every single one of that year's Oscar nominees – Judi Dench in Mrs. Henderson Presents, Charlize Theron in North Country, Felicity Huffman in Transamerica, Keira Knightley in Pride and Prejudice, and the winning work of Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line. In the end, while I believe she was in the Academy's top 10, it's unlikely she was the runner-up, no matter how deserving she was.
The Upside of Anger is available to rent from Amazon, Google Play, Youtube, and others.