The Upside of Anger

I'm starting the early Oscar buzz for next year nominating Joan Allen for Best Actress. She owns The Upside of Anger, a tragic drama with comedic bits written and directed by Mike Binder, from start to finish. She's strong, funny and amazing.

Allen is Terry Wolfmeyer, a woman whose husband leaves her for his secretary and goes to Sweden. It happens unexpectedly one day and he doesn't say anything to her or their daughters. After this, Terry becomes this hateful woman who takes on heavy drinking and smoking pot with her friend Denny, a former baseball superstar, now a sports talkshow host on a local radio, played by Kevin Costner. He's also excellent as the stoned and drunk, but also serious when needed Denny.

The daughters are 4, and they already hate or are soon going to hate her mother because of they way she treats them, Terry tells us at the beginning of the movie.
Alicia Witt plays the leaving for college Hadley, who can't wait to leave the house and her mother. She then plans to get married but she tells her mother the day of her graduation, also the same day she's going to make her mother and sisters meet her in-laws, who've known of the marriage plans for some time now. Easy to predict that Terry wont be so happy about the situation.
Then we have Erika Christensen as Andy, who's skipping college to start working, so Denny, trying to help despite Terry being against it, gets her a job as an assistant producer on the radio. Andy also starts a relation with Denny's producer Shep, a kind of dirty 40 something year old. He's played by writer and director Mike Binder.
Felicity's Keri Russell plays third daughter Emily, who dreams of dancing and go to ballet school, which is an Art School she tells her mother trying to convince her to let go there. She also starts a bad eating habit so can stay thin for ballet.
Finally, the so beautiful but only 17 years old Evan Rachel Wood plays the young Popeye (as her family calls her), who's just in high school trying to find her first love in a awkward new friend who just joined the school she goes to.
Though they're mostly happy, Terry always finds something to complain about in their lives, justified in most cases.

At 2 hours, my only complaint is that the movie should have been maybe 10 or 15 more minutes longer, making the daughters' stories longer, and allowing these amazing young actresses to show off they excellent acting skills. But it's not a big complaint, because it's all about Terry and her story and performance, dramatic, funny, and hateful but understandable. And it's very early, but maybe it's time, after 3 nominations, for Joan Allen to get the gold.