The big twist is that The Dad has not abandoned his family but has fallen in a well and died. His body is not discovered for, like, three years. Time is kind of vague in “The Upside of Anger.” This could have been a fascinating development because it means he’s not the person they all thought he was. Apparently they thought him capable of leaving them, but he didn’t. The lives they’ve built up for three years surround a mistake. Think of “Mystic River,” in which the wife becomes convinced her husband is a murderer, but then he isn’t. Think “Solaris,” in which the scientist’s dead wife is brought back to life, but only how he remembers her, and not how she really was.
It’s the reverse of what Audrey Tautou said in “A Very Long Engagement,” about how she’d rather think of her fiancé as living with another woman than dead in the trenches. It’s the reverse of what happens in so many stories: a mother will tell her child that “daddy’s dead” rather than admit that his father is living with a cocktail waitress in Vegas or Darth Vader.
The creepy part of “The Upside of Anger” is that, besides a few moments of stone faces at the funeral and watching The Mom cry, everyone is mostly, well, happy. They’re so happy that they don’t have to live with their anger anymore. They’ve all been basically self-centered through the entire movie, but this is a new low. No guilt for having believed Dad did something so terrible for so long. No guilt for feeling so happy that he’s dead, the way relatives will often feel guilty about being relieved when long comatose family members finally die.
Obviously he must not have been that great of a father and a husband if his family could believe him capable of abandoning them. But there’s a difference between dealing with a struggling father and not feeling bad when a parent dies. It’s as if Desdemona died of natural causes a few days before Othello planned on murdering her, and then years later he found out she was true after all. Do you think he would cry for a couple minutes and then say “that’s such great news, now I don’t have to carry around all this negative energy!” No, the Moor would probably impale Iago on a church steeple, take up some self-flagellation, proclaim Desdemona’s innocence to the world, and then maybe throw himself off a cliff.
None of this occurs to “The Upside of Anger,” because the women all need to show the middle distance how strong they are by staring at it in unison.
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
Review of "The Upside of Anger."