‘…is the person you can become.’ Apparently. Perhaps it’s all about the can. Yes, Joan Allen, you can quit doing all the angry faces you learnt in actor school, and drag your character to a point of quasi-convincing redemption. You are just choosing not to.

In fairness, it isn’t all her fault. The Upside of Anger has characters (including Allen’s estranged, boozy mother of four) where the plot should be. Attempts at narrative include a husband running off with his Swedish secretary (bite down hard on a tea towel!) and daughters afflicted with a tiresome cornucopia of teenage issues from anorexia to something that starts with z. I don’t know what, and I don’t care.

Oh yeah, I forgot. Kevin Costner’s in it, playing the boozy washed-up sports star next door. Wait a god-darned minute… two middle-aged, lonely, depressive alcoholics… living right next door to each other? Whashgonnappen?

Bored, bored, bored.

Evan Rachel Wood is kind of OK, in the face of some double shit plotlines, as youngest daughter Popeye. Her stoned gay best friend, for reasons never entirely illuminated, bungee jumps into her family’s living room, shattering the French windows. (Hard-up, perma-raging Allen bats not an eyelid.) Popeye is also, providently, making a pretentious and heavy-handed documentary for her film class about ANGER, scenes of which we are treated to at intervals. And this is the most sympathetic character.

It’s not a lazy effort, just an approach that doesn’t come off. There are interesting germs of ideas under all the angsty flapping about, and endearing flashes of ‘What the…?’ throughout, but these offer precious little compensation for a total lack of substance. The alternative tagline, by the way, is ‘Sometimes what tears us apart helps us put it back together’, which I’m not even sure makes grammatical sense. That’s what kind of movie you’re dealing with.

by Laura Phelps