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Features
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The Upside of Allen
In both The Upside of Anger and the film festival hit Yes, 48-year-old Joan Allen continues to prove that an actress of a certain age can be both strong-willed and sexy.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
By Brett Buckalew
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Allen at Sundance
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Being a three-time Academy Award nominee is certainly impressive, and having a creative hand in two of last summer’s biggest crowd-pleasers (The Bourne Supremacy, The Notebook) is no small feat either.
But what’s most astonishing about the career of acclaimed character actress Joan Allen is how, in film after film, she has honestly and candidly portrayed the still-burning sexuality of older women, despite working in an industry that lazily equates sex and youth as being synonymous. Whether the lust of her characters is wildly liberated (Pleasantville), misdirected into passionless spouse-swapping (The Ice Storm), held up for public scrutiny (The Contender), or repressed until it bitterly simmers (The Crucible), Allen remains sharply intuitive of how to tear into the carnal desire of women largely ignored by an age-obsessed society.
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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Anger manager Binder
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Her newest film continues this provocative trend, albeit in a warmly comedic way. In The Upside of Anger, from writer-director Mike Binder (Indian Summer, the HBO series The Mind of the Married Man), Allen plays Terry Wolfmeyer, a harried mother of four strong-willed daughters (Erika Christensen, Evan Rachel Wood, Keri Russell, Alicia Witt) who embarks on a fling with randy, rascally ex-baseball player Denny (Kevin Costner). Since Terry’s husband has just recently dumped her for his younger secretary, she is reluctant to get beyond any connection other than the physical kind with Denny, but must consider leaping into commitment when he becomes a devoted member of her family.
When asked during a recent one-one-one interview with FilmStew if it’s rare to find a middle-aged character as sexually open as Terry, the 48-year-old Allen delights in the answer. “I’ve had some people already comment, some older women going, ‘Thank God we’re seeing a sexy older couple!’” she explains. “You and Kevin are the right age for each other, [and] there’s chemistry goin’ on. This is so refreshing!’ It feels so good, and I really love that the film does that.”
In terms of giving life to the romance between Terry and Denny, Allen also gives credit to Costner, who returns to the jokey, sly-dog charisma of his Crash Davis character in Bull Durham, the role that helped jump-start his career seventeen years ago.
“We just clicked,” Allen marvels. “It just is a great part for him. He’s so good in it. He’s really charming, and…[it was] just one of those situations where it’s a tennis match or something, where you feel like you’re kind of playing off the other person.”
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Jeffrey Mayer/Wireimage.com
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In love and in great cinematic form
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The actress is also aware of how the onscreen duet between her and Costner carries with it the power of the unexpected, since the highbrow art films she specializes in are a far cry from the big-budget blockbusters (The Bodyguard, Waterworld) he has become known for. “Because of the types of films that I’ve done, and the type of work that he’s done, there’s something a little bit surprising about [the] two of us being together,” Allen observes. “You know, just a little bit, and I think that works in our favor.”
Writer-director Binder can pat himself on the back for conceiving of this unlikely star pairing, and also for keeping a promise to Allen. While co-starring with her in The Contender five years ago, Binder, who is also an actor, pledged to Allen that he would write a comedy with her in mind for the lead role.
When Allen finally received his finished script for The Upside of Anger, the role proved to be worth the wait. Terry, whose erratic mood swings and tendency to drown her sorrows in booze are played for both high drama and belly laughs, is any actor’s dream.
“I just thought it was a character that would be just really fun to tackle,” Allen raves. “She’s just all over the place, and behaving really badly a lot of times, and being self-indulgent and sad and not very self-aware. I knew it was a really rich, unique character to get to play.”
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Jeff Vespa/Wireimage.com
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Yes director Sally Potter
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As Terry focuses on drinking and Denny more than her daughters, she finds herself unprepared for the family crises that start breaking out, like middle child Andy’s (Christensen) questionable relationship with a sleazy, middle-aged radio-show producer (played by Binder himself) or oldest daughter Hadley’s (Witt) pregnancy.
Of the character’s shaky parenting skills, Allen says, “I think that’s very lifelike. Mike used to say, ‘Okay, yeah, the father leaves, but life goes on,’ and that’s a fact. And not every day is like doom and gloom. You still have to go to school, you still have to get the groceries, you still have to get dinner on the table. You still have to do all these things, and I think that’s what audiences are really responding to.”
As the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, Allen can even identify with Terry’s constant balancing act. “I think I’m a very different personality type than Terry,” she first clarifies, “but I certainly think I can recognize, ‘Well, today, I felt like I was a pretty good parent, for, like, two hours. Boy, did I blow it yesterday between those four hours.’”
If parenting poses a challenge for Allen, it’s hard to think of any professional situation that would offer a similar degree of difficulty, considering that she has worked with notoriously obsessive, allegedly difficult filmmakers like Michael Mann (in her film debut, Manhunter) and Oliver Stone (as First Lady in Nixon). Of Mann, she gushes, “I love Michael Mann! He’s a maniac! He would shoot 22 hours a day, and [he would] love it! I mean, I liked him so much. He is passionate, [and] he just loves actors.”
Though she has talked with Mann about teaming up again, she concedes she may be fooling herself. "It’s been a while since I worked with him," she says with a smile. "I might not be able to keep up with him.”
But some ten years ago, Allen had no trouble keeping up with Stone, since the mercurial auteur was in a considerably mellow state of mind. “He was in a very calm sort of phase,” the actress recalls of Stone during the filming of Nixon. “People had said he was in his Buddhist phase, and he maybe takes on a little bit, from what I’ve been told, the nature of the film he’s working on. Like, Natural Born Killers would be a totally different experience.”
| In the near future, Allen has a couple of far more low-key projects on the horizon, with filmmakers known more for their indie credibility than their egos. In fact, opening tomorrow in limited release the same day as The Upside of Anger is Allen’s turn for actor-turned-director Campbell Scott. In Off the Map, she plays the head of a family living off the grid in the wilderness of New Mexico and describes it the film as a “Terrence Malick sort of feeling, because the landscape plays a big part.”
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Meanwhile, later this year in June, Allen will be seen in Yes, an erotic drama from filmmaker Sally Potter (Orlando) about an Irish-American woman’s affair with a Lebanese chef (Simon Abkarian). “[Potter] started writing it on September 12, 2001, and it’s her response to the World Trade towers falling down,” Allen reveals. “And so it’s the affair, and then it’s how the cultural ideologies start to creep in, through Western thought vs. Eastern thought.”
Of the love scenes, which helped to make Yes one of the more buzzed-about titles at last fall’s Toronto Film Festival, Allen says, “there’s no nudity in [the film] at all, but it’s very sexy, a very sexy film.” And because Allen has been so suggestively sexual in so many movies, and because many of her performances are inflected with an adult understanding of love and desire, it’s incredibly easy to trust this assessment.
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