If you saw a marquee reading “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn,” starring Robin Williams and you immediately pictured a red in the face Williams spewing bile at a cabdriver, then well, you’d be pretty much right. This very scene occurs minutes into the film, after a brief flashback showing Williams as a content family man in the late 1980s. This transition asks the main question of the film - what turns did this man’s life take for him to go from being happy to being totally consumed with anger?
Williams stars as Henry Altmann, a man who finds sources of rage and aggravation all around him, a man for whom every day is a bad day. After going to the hospital after a minor car accident, Henry meets young doctor Sharon Gill (Mila Kunis), who is having a bad day herself; her cat has just died, an older doctor is callously taking advantage of her both personally and professionally, and she’s forgotten the idealism that led her to medicine in the first place. Dr. Gill has the unenviable task of telling Altmann that he has a brain aneurysm, exacerbated by his prolific anger, and he might not have long to live. She tries to refer him to a specialist, but he yells and badgers her into giving him a number of just how long he has. Flustered and upset, she picks the first number she thinks of, 90 minutes, picking it from the front of a nearby cooking magazine.
Stunned with this news, Altmann storms off across Brooklyn, trying to tie up the loose ends of his life. First he goes to the law firm he runs with his brother (Peter Dinklage), then home to see his wife (Melissa Leo), all the while searching for his estranged son (Hamish Linklater), but despite his conciliatory motives, none of these encounters go the way he planned, leading to even more fits of rage. Meanwhile, Dr. Gill, fearing both for her job and for Altmann, who she has learned really could die at any minute, pursues Altmann across the city, usually one step behind him as he moves quickly from place to place. As Altmann interacts with friends and family members, the film slowly reveals the roots of his anger.
On a scene-by-scene basis, “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn” usually fails. The comedy is broad and somewhat mean, and Williams’ manic anger shtick has been wearing thin for decades. But the film does a good job of portraying those moments, usually thrust upon us, that jolt us from the normal routine of life and allow us the perspective to wonder just how we got here, how we became this person in the mirror instead of the person we would like to be. While these are questions always worth thinking about, there are probably better ways of doing so than seeing this film.
