The Upside of Anger

So Nina and I go see this movie while I’m home, which is a welcome two hours free of the insanely crowded streets (walking out of her building, we have to wait for a few clumps of people to pass before we can enter the sidewalk and Nina says, “Sometimes it’s really hard to merge out of this building.”) of my former neighborhood. The movie is on the Lifetimeish side (albeit with a few swear words thrown in to throw us off scent), but the acting is good, Kevin Costner being the biggest surprise, in my opinion. It’s not like it’s a big stretch, he plays a washed-up baseball player, again, but he looks a little more washed up these days, and I liked his Michigan accent, and I dunno, he was just sort of lumpishly appealing. So he and Joan Allen are basically these older single drunks who hook up after her husband leaves her without a word. A perfectly acceptable story, and there’s one scene that actually makes me think about the value of anger (although, when I subsequently lost my temper with someone the following day, I can’t say I felt that there was anything of value about the moment), but here’s the thing – there’s a sort of twist, if you will, near the end, which is completely ludicrous for a film like this. It’s not a thriller. Nina said it ruined it for her, which I can understand. I just tried to pretend it wasn’t there, because it was the sort of twist whereby the entire preceding movie suddenly has an entirely different meaning, which they now have no time to address because it’s the end of the movie. But it amounts to, Huh, what I thought was true for three years, everything that affected everything in my life, was not true at all. Which is pretty annoying.