Costner and His Anger

Originally Published: February 27, 2005

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Kevin Costner, whose previous baseball movies include Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and For Love of the Game plays a retired ballplayer in the comic drama, The Upside of Anger, which premiered recently at the Sundance Film Festival.

In a big turn-around for Costner, he plays a supporting role to the film’s central character, played by Joan Allen.

The actor known for such dramas as Dances With Wolves, JFK and The Untouchables is playing a good old goofball, with a dopey laugh and a chronic marijuana buzz and a long-neck beer bottle perpetually in hand.

Opening theatrically in March, The Upside of Anger stars Allen as a woman with four daughters who turns boozy and bitter after her husband pulls a vanishing act. Costner plays her laid-back neighbor, a former baseball star who becomes her drinking buddy and eventually tumbles into an uneasy relationship as her lover and referee for the woman’s spats with her daughters.

Mike Binder, who co-starred as a lecherous pal who produces a radio talk show hosted by Costner’s character, also wrote the screenplay for the film and Costner helped secure the financing.

One of Hollywood’s biggest box-office draws in the late 1980s and early ’90s with Field of Dreams, Dances With Wolves and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Costner has had mixed results with his movies over the last 12 years.

Last summer’s Western Open Range, which Costner directed and starred in, and the golf romance Tin Cup were modest successes. But his acclaimed political drama Thirteen Days failed to find an audience, and he had flops with such movies as the supernatural thriller Dragonfly and the heist flick 3000 Miles to Graceland. “I think some of the movies haven’t lived up to what they should have been,” Costner has said. “When they’re not done for a lot of money, sometimes you get a clearer voice, one single voice, about what the movie’s to be about. And some of the movies for me that have not performed as well as I thought they could have, I think was because too many voices enter into them.”

Costner said he feels no career pressure to deliver another breakout hit, saying his films have been profitable enough between theatrical and home-video revenues.

“I know what my movies do economically. I like everybody else understand what they do on opening weekend,” Costner said. “The economic life of my movies, I’m really comfortable with what happens to them when they go out there, and so are the studios.”

For more on this film, including photos and a full synopsis, CLICK HERE»