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 fianc� 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."