Tagline: …is the person you can become.
Kevin Costner, Joan Allen, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell and Alicia Witt headline a stellar ensemble cast in the critically acclaimed Sundance festival hit The Upside of Anger. Allen stars as the sharp-witted Terry Wolfmeyer, a suburban wife and mother who is left to raise her four headstrong daughters when her husband unexpectedly disappears.
Things get even more hectic when Terry falls for her neighbor Denny (Kevin Costner), a once-great baseball star turned radio DJ, and her daughters are forced to juggle their mom’s romantic dilemmas as well as their own.
Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, Academy Award winner Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell and Alicia Witt headline a stellar ensemble cast in the comedic drama The Upside of Anger.
Allen stars as the sharp-witted Terry Wolfmeyer, a suburban wife and mother whose life takes an unusual turn when her husband unexpectedly disappears. Struggling to deal with his sudden absence, Terry finds herself increasingly at odds with her four headstrong daughters (Christensen, Wood, Russell and Witt) and regularly drowning her anger in alcohol, until she develops an offbeat relationship with her next-door neighbor, Denny (Kevin Costner).
A once-great baseball star turned radio DJ, Denny becomes a drinking buddy for Terry and slowly evolves into her source of strength, as well as an ad-hoc father to her daughters. But things get complicated as Terry’s daughters grow accustomed to having Denny around while attempting to juggle not only their mother’s romantic dilemmas, but their own.
About the Production
For a film with such a richly-layered storyline, The Upside of Anger had a relatively simple beginning. A very personal movie for writer/director Mike Binder, the script was inspired in large part by his own experiences growing up as a child with divorced parents and his desire to explore the impact that anger and emotion can have on a family.
“When I was a kid, my parents separated and my mother went through a tough time for a lot of years,” says Binder. “I thought that would be a great way to get to this point that I wanted to write about. I conceived the whole screenplay as a parable of sorts on misplaced anger, about the things in life that people often spend so much time being angry and upset about, only to later find out what they thought was right was actually wrong, or vice versa.”
The topic is a marked departure from Binder’s previous work, which includes more lighthearted looks at love and relationships in the comedy The Sex Monster and the HBO series “The Mind of the Married Man.” But with The Upside of Anger, Binder found it inspiring to explore new territory with his script and to approach his subject from a unique angle.
“When I first read the script, I thought it was fantastic – I can’t remember a script I’ve read that was so original, truthful, and funny,” says producer Alex Gartner, a former president of production for MGM/United Artists. “Mike brought a fresh voice to the kind of movie we are not seeing enough of anymore, and the response we got from actors was better than on any project I can remember being involved with.”
“This is one of the best scripts that Mike has ever written, and I think it really elevates his work to a new level,” says producer Jack Binder. “The amazing thing is that the quality of his writing was so good that it really drove the film to get made. It made a group of talented actors eager to work on the film and is the type of material that will really attract an audience.”
Gartner adds that one of the script’s greatest strengths was the way in which it does not cleanly fit into any predisposed genre category, instead blending elements of comedy, drama and family films.
Mike Binder’s personal investment in the script was furthered by his additional roles as director and supporting actor. “Mike brings the whole package. He’s a triple threat – a real actor’s director who can also write the hell out of a script,” says Gartner.
Binder may have first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to be an actor, but in order to pen a script that revolved largely around women, he turned to the women in his own life for inspiration.
“To me, women and men are not all that different,” says Binder. “Like everyone, I have a mother and I’m also married, I have women in my life and you just write about the people that you see day to day.”
Binder decided to reflect the male perspective on the movie’s themes through the character of Denny, a retired professional baseball player turned radio DJ played by Kevin Costner.
“I wanted Denny to have been in a real kind of guy’s mode and guy’s world until he meets this family and becomes inundated with these females,” says Binder.
“And I wanted to really be able to watch how that affected him positively, negatively and emotionally – to see what the mix of being part of the Wolfmeyer family did to him.”
The Upside of Anger not only addresses the impact of anger from both a male and female perspective, but also examines the impact that emotion has on the family as a whole.
“I think there are going to be a lot of women who will really relate to this because divorce is so common and families splitting up has become so common,” says Joan Allen. “But I think what Mike has really done is examined closely what happens. We all say it’s not good for the family, but nobody really talks about the toll it takes and what it means to children whose father is suddenly no longer a part of their lives.”
“How does that really feel?” Allen continues. “How does that make a woman feel? How does that make children feel? I think that’s talked about a lot, but it’s not really seen, and that’s what I think this film really demonstrates. I think Mike has zeroed in on that and it’s going to hit the heart and strike a lot of people, but not in a preachy way. It’s just going to be very fun, a light venture into this area that’s a huge part of the global culture in this century.”
In order to bring The Upside of Anger to life on the big screen, Binder and the film’s producers knew they would need to attract a talented and diverse cast. The lineup they ultimately secured surpassed even their highest hopes. “I’ve always been somebody who believes it starts with the material, and Mike Binder wrote a great, edgy script that attracted an amazing group of performers who saw the potential in the material,” says producer Alex Gartner.
For the central role of Terry, the suddenly single matriarch of the Wolfmeyer family, Binder cast three-time Academy Award nominee Joan Allen, whom he had become friendly with when they both worked as actors on the drama The Contender.
“When I first read the script I definitely thought of it as a comedy, but it has very poignant parts throughout,” says Allen. “I know Mike wants it to be very multidimensional, especially for my character, because he doesn’t want it to be just one thing. That made it really fun to do the scenes because one day Terry is incredibly charming, and the next day she is tearing her hair out, then the next she is being a real pill. As an actor, I get to play a wide variety of emotional levels, which is great.”
Best known for her work in such dramatic films as Nixon and The Ice Storm, Allen was thrilled by the opportunity to take on a role laced with comedic elements. “Mike and I had worked together several years ago and I remember saying to him that maybe someday he could write something for me and that I would love to be in a comedy,” says Allen. “So he wrote this for me and I always thought of it as a comedy in which the humor comes from just the reality of the characters. There’s a lot of humor in real life.”
Binder remembers Allen’s offhand query well. “Joan told me on the set of The Contender that she had seen a movie I had written and directed called The Sex Monster, and asked when I was going to write a comedy for her, that she loved to do comedy. I told her to be careful what she wished for because of course I loved the idea of writing a role for her. So when the idea for The Upside of Anger came together, I was already thinking about what I could write for Joan. She’s an amazing presence.”
While Allen was excited to flex her comedic muscles on screen, Binder and the producers were thrilled to work with an actress whose range enabled the character he had envisioned on the page to spring to life.
“There was only Joan to play this part since Mike had written it specifically for her – in essence, she was Terry,” says producer Alex Gartner. “And she didn’t disappoint when she took on the role. It gave her a chance to do things she doesn’t usually do.”
While Allen may have been the first cast member to sign on to the project, she was far from the only one with an impressive resume. For the pivotal role of Denny, a retired baseball player and Terry’s next door neighbor turned love interest, Binder turned to an actor he had long admired – Kevin Costner.
“Kevin and I didn’t know each other well, but we had met in the early 1990’s when he walked up to me in a restaurant and said he was a fan of my comedy,” says Mike Binder. “We sat and talked for a bit, and then I saw him again years later at a movie premiere. He asked me what I was currently working on and I told him about this movie I was doing with Joan Allen, and he agreed to read the script.”
Costner, a veteran of portraying baseball players in such films as Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, sparked to the script and saw the character of Denny as very different from past athletes he has portrayed.
“Denny is a retired player and the twist on the character is that he really doesn’t acknowledge the game of baseball – he is a sports radio DJ who really just likes to talk about everything but baseball and wants his life to move on,” says Costner. “He is not your prototypical athlete who is looking to score all the time with the girls. He doesn’t try to cash in on his past fame, he really just wants to fit in somewhere.”
These production notes provided by New Line Cinema.
The Upside of Anger
Starring: Joan Allen, Kevin Costner, Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt, Mike Binder
Directed by: Mike Binder
Screenplay by: Mike Binder
Release Date: March 11th, 2005
MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence, drug use.
Distributor: New Line Cinema
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $18,761,993 (66.4%)
Foreign: $9,475,197 (33.6%)
Total: $28,237,190 (Worldwide)