Grade: B | Genre: Drama Summary: If you can see your way past some troublesome plot holes, The Upside of Anger will reward you with an intriguing portrait of a dysfunctional family struggling to maintain its sanity among the chaos and the love.

Joan Allen is one of the great actresses in Hollywood who has been largely neglected. She has quietly built an impressive resume of films (the Ice Storm, the Contender, Nixon) that have allowed her talents to stretch out in a variety of roles. The Upside of Anger is no different where Allen shines as Terry Wolfmeyer, an alcoholic, stifling mother of four whose life has been flipped upside down through her husband's abrupt leaving. The story doesn't waste a moment as she lays this shocking entree out over dinner with her three daughters in the film's opening frame. Terry's anger and venom are just boiling over as she's poised a step away from taking a hatchet to his head, wherever he may be, or crumbling under the weight of her freshly emptied life.

What is also clear from these initial moments is that she is a controlling bitch, not allowing any of her daughters to have a valid thought or choice of their own. She is a master at unleashing waves of guilt and pulling the strings of everyone around her like a studied puppet master. All her daughters fear her and despisingly love her to varying degrees. Kevin Costner enters the picture as Denny Davies, an ex-baseball star who is aging roughly with the help of Budweiser. Denny, a friend of Terry's recently departed husband, has eyes for Terry and persistently weasels his way into her life like a lost puppy dog desperate for a home.

The girls instantly take to Denny as they quickly notice how his boyish demeanor somehow takes the edge off their mother, even for the briefest of moments. He is slowly chipping away at her massive walls in a way that none of them could. The girls find their way to rebel in their own unique fashion. Hadley (Alicia Witt) keeps her relationship with her boyfriend under wraps for three years then unveils that she is pregnant and getting married the first day Terry meets the chap. Andy (Erika Christensen) has decided to forgo college to pursue a career in broadcasting, to the endless protest to the contrary from Terry. Matters aren't helped when Andy brings home her 50-something boss (Mike Bender) as her boyfriend. Emily (Keri Russell) is a borderline anorexic, ballet dancer who longs badly to attend art school to study dance, yet Terry squashes her dreams as unpractical and unrealistic. Thankfully, she summons the courage to defy her and go anyway.

What stands out is that every girl is mapping out the woman she is to become though none ultimately let Terry get the upper hand. They all practice their own means of civil disobedience and swiftly brace themselves for the wrath that will surely come. The dynamic between Terry and each of the daughters is one of the best parts of the film. Each has such a unique personality that unquestionably reflects on the best parts of Terry that the long road of life has silenced within her. In each of them, she sees all of her lost dreams and possibilities, and she selfishly can't handle the fact that her daughters could actually live the life that was almost hers. This is all an undercurrent though and you can tell she does love all of them, yet she can't express it in a way that they would ever see it. She harbors her feelings tightly to her chest like ill-mannered school children.

Denny ends up being a welcomed addition to the mix. When he is first introduced, he is such a one-dimensional character that it's inevitable pull out the appropriate stereotypes to promptly pin on him. As the film progresses, he brushes each of them off as you begin to wonder why an ex-baseball star refuses to discuss baseball on his radio show and start to question if his drinking problems stem from this as well. This picture was in dire need of the comic relief he provides. Terry has us holding our breath from the second the camera starts rolling, so when he bolts in to slice through the stress-ridden tension with a laugh the humor ends up inflated by ten fold.

The problems here all seem to revolve around the storyline. The film spans a three year period and there are pockets of the film that are severely disjointed and it's a stretch to make them fit into the fabric of the larger picture. Some scenes are confusing, attempting to calculate how much time the writer has jumped ahead. There is often no signal given to the viewer to let them prepare themselves to make this jump. It has the feel of an adapted novel that must strip out large sections to fit into the two hour window, yet the screenwriter seemingly forgets that he needs to compensate for that lost chunk of story.

Also, the plot line is infected with some troubling inconsistencies. The ending, which I will of course let you discover on your own, brings into question one of the major elements shaping this film. Terry makes a very reaching assumption that, at best, has a shaky foundation. Key pieces of the story, like what triggered Emily's submission to the hospital, are glossed over. The end diagnosis that she was suffering from stress rang empty since we'd been fed clues throughout that she was afflicted with anorexia. So which is it? Several of these crop up to distract us from the film's true focus. These questions fall squarely on writer/director Mike Bender, who plays greasy Shep and wrote, directed and starred in HBO's critically acclaimed drama "Mind of the Married Man".

The positives drown out the negatives here as Joan Allen gives the sharpest performance of her storied career, and if this had been released in December I guarantee there would be plenty of Oscar chatter buzzing about. Binder said that he wrote this script specifically with Allen in mind, and he has provided her with the perfect vehicle to feature her talents. The conflict that arises when she hits up against each of her daughters really allow her to fully flesh this character out. Costner also puts up a great performance that we have been missing from his spotty outings of late. If you can see your way past some troublesome plot holes, The Upside of Anger will reward you with an intriguing portrait of a dysfunctional family struggling to maintain its sanity among the chaos and the love.

Buy or rent the Upside of Anger now.