"The Upside of Anger" is that Joan Allen conveys it so brilliantly.

She does a slow burn, she smolders, she almost immolates with fury (the veins in her neck visibly strain against her skin), but she can't make the rest of the movie catch fire in the same way. I wanted to flee from the fictional family in "Imaginary Heroes," reviewed elsewhere on these pages, until I came across this clan.

		'The Upside of Anger' Rating: R for language, sexual situations, brief comic violence and some drug use Starring: Joan Allen, Kevin Costner Director: Mike Binder

The actress known for portraying the first lady in "Nixon," a 1950s mother in "Pleasantville" and a vice-presidential candidate in "The Contender" here plays Terry, a suburban Michigan wife and mother whose husband disappears, leaving her with their four daughters, all in high school or in college.

Money doesn't seem to be an issue since she makes no effort to find a job or to locate the husband she believes ran off with his Swedish secretary. To blunt her pain and outrage, she drinks, alone or with a neighbor named Denny (Kevin Costner), a retired baseball player who has a radio talk show on which he discusses everything but sports.

Denny, a onetime World Series winner, sports a perpetual stubble, a slight double chin and a few extra pounds around the middle, probably due to his fondness for beer and marijuana. He is increasingly drawn into Terry's universe, family and household, which is fraught with drama.

The eldest (Alicia Witt) tends to mutter disparaging comments under her breath and interprets her mother's comments as insults, whether intended that way or not. Another (Erika Christensen) aspires to be a newscaster and takes up with a skeevy middle-age radio producer (Mike Binder, also the movie's writer and director).

A third daughter (Keri Russell) is a dancer whose artistic dream hits too close to home for Terry. That leaves the youngest (Evan Rachel Wood), a precocious 15-year-old who serves as the narrator and is working on a school project that brings the title and movie theme into focus at the end.

"The Upside of Anger" opens with three mourners on their way to a funeral, which makes the moviegoers wonder throughout just who died. Will Terry's tendency to speed through the neighborhood catch up with her? Will one of the girls succumb to illness, as in "Little Women"? Or will it be something we haven't imagined?

Binder, whose own parents separated when he was a child, conceived this story as a parable on misplaced anger, which is a most intriguing concept.

However, we never see Terry in her previous incarnation -- "the nicest person I know," her youngest daughter says -- so it's harder to appreciate her ugly U-turn. A scene in which Terry imagines the radio producer's head exploding, graphically, at the dinner table, simply seems out of place.

Terry wraps her anger around her like a woolen shawl on a cold night. She may well deserve to, but her unwillingness to throw it off -- during a graduation or wedding celebration -- becomes tiresome, as does the behavior of her daughters.

Costner, who has played a pitcher, a catcher and a golfer, looks like a former athlete slightly gone to seed. His past performances inform his character, and if he's not at the top of his game, he's still swinging for the fences.

Clocking in at two hours, "The Upside of Anger" covers a three-year period. Despite some occasional moments of levity and Allen's excellent turn and Costner's very good one, it ends up feeling interminable.