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Powerlessness. It is the hardest fact of the human condition to accept. Denied control and influence, people turn to violence in order to gain respect. In Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon, a mugger points a pistol at Kevin Kline and voices the credo of many inner-city miscreants: "No gun, no respect! That's why I always got the gun."
Fortunately, a few films venture to suggest other ways to respond to this sense of powerlessness. The more popular of these films spend an hour or so entertaining us with the angry exploits of sympathetic cynics, then tack on a question or a crisis of conscience at the conclusion. Fight Club, Donnie Darko, and American Beauty conclude that "love is the answer," but not until they have served up the vicarious satisfactions of violent confrontation, sarcastic vitriol, and the humiliation of the hero's enemies.
You have to look for quieter films like In the Bedroom to find a focused study of anger that does not also appease our appetite for violent spectacle. Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek play the parents of a murdered boy who watch the killer go free in a failure of the court system. Instead of grieving together, they harden their hearts to carry out vigilante justice, like the vengeful cowboy William Munny in Unforgiven. But the rush and glory of victory eludes them. They are left in smoking ruin, the void in their hearts deepened by their surrender to violence.
More profound alternatives are available in the two ministers played by Mel Gibson (Signs) and Robert Duvall (The Apostle). Gibson plays a pastor broken by the loss of his wife and fearful of an alien invasion. Powerless to stop these things, he finds he can no longer turn his back on God. He re-establishes his dialogue with the Divine, raising his ire against the Almighty. And God responds with a lesson about sovereignty that, like Bruce Almighty, strikes some resonant chords in spite of its narrative contrivances. Duvall's minister responds violently to the loss of his wife to infidelity and his church to distrust and betrayal. "I love you, Lord," he rants, "but I'm mad at you!" Again, God absorbs the anger and responds with reassurance and grace. Like Job, the minister begins anew, rejoicing in spite of the cost of his own sin, joyful for reasons other than revenge.
Perhaps the most intriguing recent examination of anger comes in Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-drunk Love. Anderson's previous film, Magnolia, was rich in symbolic warnings of judgment and the need for familial love. Here again, failures of the family drive the hero to angry outbursts. Barry Egan (Adam Sandler) is a toilet-plunger salesman—ironic, considering the way his heart is clogged with rage and emotional debris. Barry's seven insensitive sisters manipulate and bully him. Even alone, he flinches as if surrounded by porcupines. No one seems worthy of trust. No one really listens.
Desperate and weak, Barry calls a phone-sex line. It is intimacy, not arousal, he intends to purchase. Instead, he finds betrayal and gains a ruthless enemy. Things look bad for Barry: he ticks like a bomb we suspect will explode when he finally faces his foe.
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