women on the verge; The Upside of Anger unleashes Joan Allen as a wronged wife in all her fury, while Palindromes has eight people playing the same thirteen-year-old girl.

From Mary Tyler Moore's crushingly uptight mom in Ordinary People to Marcia Cross's steel pixie on Desperate Housewives, American pop culture never tires of turning

out the brittle, kabuki-faced homemaker who can't let herself admit what she's actually feeling for fear her brain might go off like a car alarm. The queen of such thankless roles is surely Joan Allen. With her firm nose, austere cheekbones, and patrician bearing, this is an

actress born to stoically endure the raging ice storms

of the spirit.

She finally gets to cut loose in The Upside of Anger, an uneven but highly watchable story about a woman's dissolution that plays like Little Women from Marmee's point of view. Allen is Terry Wolfmeyer, a suburban Detroit housewife whose life is shattered when her husband suddenly disappears-he's evidently run off with his young Swedish assistant. Overnight, Terry becomes a changed woman. Tossing aside the role of the nurturing supermom, she turns the world into one giant Pamplona bull run, stumbling around the house while guzzling expensive

vodka, hurling imprecations against her worthless husband, and bristling with annoyance at all four of her daughters, each of whom could use some mothering. Hadley (Alicia Witt) is pregnant and getting married; wannabe ballerina Emily (Felicity's Keri Russell) has an eating disorder. And even as the ambitious Andy (Swimfan's Erika Christensen) is having an affair with a scuzzy middle-aged radio producer, beaming

fifteen-year-old Popeye (Thirteen's Evan Rachel Wood) is falling for a gay stoner. Mired in bitterness and self-pity, Terry barely registers their existence, let alone their circumstances. The only person who can get her to relax is her not-so-bright neighbor Denny (Kevin Costner), a retired baseball star (shades of Terms of Endearment's ex-astronaut) who shambles through life in a state of genial randiness.