My mentor in film study, Professor Charles Samuels of Williams College, used to be notorious for walking out of movies in the first five or ten minutes. He was determined to see everything worth seeing, but not to waste a minute on trash. I, however, determined not to cut the performance short on anything I went into with some presupposition of quality. So if I decide to watch something, I usually watch it to the end. My god, I even made it to the end of Lethal Weapon, though it made me feel unclean to do so (but I had the sense to go nowhere near LW2 or 3 or 4.) So it was quite a statement when I couldn’t bear more than half of The Upside of Anger. If you surmise that something showcasing Joan Allen as the mother of a bevy of beautiful daughters has to have some redeeming value, let me disabuse you of that notion. I’ll forego names to protect innocent and guilty alike. This film’s one utility is to highlight by their absence all the virtues of The Squid and the Whale in detailing a family breakup, by using it only as a setup for shtick, neither funny nor true, and painful only in its ineptness.
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