Reign Over Me (2007) -vs- The Upside of Anger (2005)

The Smackdown. Writer/director/actor Mike Binder tells a couple of heartfelt stories about people dealing with pain, about loved ones who have left, and the power of damaged people to heal each other. Oh, and each of the main characters' families consists of three daughters.

   
"Just keep laughing. If enough people see the trailer, they'll think we're in a comedy."

The Challenger.  Apparently, the Powers-That-Be have decided that, yes, enough time has passed where we can tell stories about 9/11. In this one, Adam Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a New York dentist who lost his wife, his three daughters and even his dog when the aircraft they were on smashed into the World Trade Center on that ugly day. Five years later, Sandler still needs help bad, but won't accept it from anybody, and has cut himself off from the world so much that the only constant companion in his life is a pair of noise-cancelling Bose headphones. I have some of these headphones, too, and I can testify that if you wore them all the time, you would be authentically out-of-touch. My kids wear them on long car-trips and when we arrive, I'm exhausted and they barely know we've left. Anyway, Fineman's salvation comes from, oddly, another dentist Alan Johnson, played by Don Cheadle. It isn't their shared history, or dental skills, that binds them together, but their mutual need to move beyond the broken stalemates their respective lives have become.

"No. That actually is a baseball in my pocket."

The Defending Champion. In "The Upside of Anger," the characters who need fixing are Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) and Denny Davies (Kevin Costner). Terry is trying to keep it together after he husband has run off to Sweden with his secretary, and Denny is trying to keep it together after his baseball career's end and his mid-life crisis have hit him like a perfect storm. They have one thing in common -- booze -- and they're slowly drinking their problems away. They, too, need to move on from the broken stalemates their own lives have become. Additionally,Terry has three girls who all have problems of their own, plus mom being there, and dad being gone.

The Scorecard. I really liked both of these films because they managed, more or less successfully, to blend a sense of humor with characters who are dealing with the awful problems life can throw at us. They feel like a full-course meal that makes you think, feel and laugh. And they make you believe that life will go on past the worst problems because there is, basically, no choice. Each film is manipulative, of course, and neither is perfect. "The Upside of Anger" is burdened with an ending that just didn't work for the majority of people who saw it, and "Reign Over Me" has to deal with the specialness of 9/11. But, as a director, Mike Binder gets the best out of his actors: Costner, Allen, Cheadle and Sandler have rarely been as good as they are in these two films. By the way, Binder appears in both. He's Shep, the loutish radio producer in "The Upside of Anger" and Sugarman, the nebbish attorney in "Reign Over Me." Honestly, he's so good as an actor he could have his own TV show.

The Decision. This is tough. Fortunately, a "Movie Smackdown!" doesn't have to tell you to see one and not the other. So, the short answer here is to see both of them and, given that you will only see "The Upside of Anger" on DVD now, you should pay your ten bucks and see "Reign Over Me" in the theater. But which is best? "Reign Over Me" has a great relationship at its core without the ending that makes you almost angry at the movie like "The Upside of Anger." So I'm going with "Reign Over Me" -- get to a theater and see it now.

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Comments

[Scott]

Upside of Anger is that rare movie that is going great and is then COMPLETELY spoiled by the ending. After such a brilliant script, I can't believe it was ended that way. It makes no sense to me that the writer and director couldn't take a step back and say, "Nope -- that ending flies completely in the face of logic."

Bryce, since you're the only screenwriter I know, can you tell me why such an ending was allowed to happen?