What does it take for you to snap?  We all have our limits, or so we tell ourselves.  This is often a moveable threshold.  If we are experiencing periods of stress, we wonder how long we can maintain our calm.  What finally pushes us over the edge can be random, or predictable.  I know I am all over the emotional spectrum right now, but we can all look back on a moment in our lives when we had enough.  How we react to those moments shapes us, in the short and long term.  We can lose family and/or friends, take on a different outlook on things, or any number of paths.  They are crossroads in our experiences that have an impact that can sometimes only take years to realize their effects.  For me, I try to always remember that God is there for me, to always come back to Him to have those wounds healed.  As we shall see, all these ideas are applicable to today’s film, The Angriest Man in Brooklyn (2014).

Interestingly, the first thing said by The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, Henry Altman (Robin Williams), is him saying that he is happy.  That is because you are seeing a flash back to twenty-five years previous with his wife Bette Altman (Melissa Leo) and their two sons.  In the present day, he is a different person.  While stuck in traffic, Henry is adding to a growing list of things he hates, which include fat people and God.  We will get to his reasons behind these intense feelings as this review unfolds.  For now, when his light finally turns green, he promptly gets into an accident.  He heads to the hospital, though this is also part of a planned follow-up from some tests that he had done with his physician, Dr. Fielding (Louis C.K.).  Instead, after two hours of waiting, he gets Dr. Sharon Gil (Mila Kunis).  She is covering for Dr. Fielding, with whom we find out later she is having an affair.  That is not her only problem.  Recently, her cat jumped out of her apartment window to its death, which was the beginning of a bad day.  She is also realizing that life as a young doctor is not the crusade to help people that she thought it would be.  In addition to being used by one of her colleagues, who is away with his real family, she is abusing prescription pills.  Thus, she is not psychologically well-equipped to deal with a patient like Henry.  This becomes apparent not long after she enters the room.  Once he gets through the annoyance of not having his usual person, Dr. Gil finally reads to him the test results.  They are not good.  He has a large brain aneurysm and does not have long to live.  When he starts demanding the exact time frame before his impending death, she at first says that they need to refer the matter to a specialist.  It only enrages him further, causing him to yell at her until he gets the information he seeks.  Finally, seeing a magazine cover for quick turkey recipes, she hollers back with ninety minutes.  At first, he does not believe her, walking out of the hospital in his gown with threats of reporting her to the medical board.  Yet, those two words “what if” begin hammering in his brain as he rides to the law office he works in with his brother, Aaron Altmann (Peter Dinklage).  While there, Henry asks Aaron and the clients with which he is meeting what they would do if they were told they had an hour and a half to live.  The general consensus is to make amends with anyone they have wronged, and spend as much time as possible with loved ones.  It gives Henry the outlines of what he needs to do.  Meanwhile, at work Dr. Gil is confronted by a co-worker, Dr. Jordan Reed (Chris Gethard), about what happened with Henry.  The conversation makes Dr. Gil realize that she needs to find Henry before he either dies or follows through on his threats.  This prompts a sort of wild goose chase, with Henry remaining one step ahead of her.  She gets to his office, tells Aaron about what is going on with Henry, only to find out that he had gone home to make love to Bette.  Henry’s attempt is rebuffed, and she angrily tells him that it is because of the death of one of their sons.  Since that time, he has been a different person, and it has led to estrangement from their living son, Tommy Altmann (Henry Linklater).  Searching for friends, Henry goes to a reunion he had arranged of all the people he had wronged, only to find one person there, a high school friend Bix Field (Richard Kind).  This, too, ends in an argument, and Henry leaves.  Aaron, Bette, and Dr. Gil arrive there shortly thereafter, Bette joining the party when she learns the same information as told to Aaron.  They decide to split up, with Dr. Gil walking around Brooklyn feeling like a failure.  She receives a boost, though, when she hears Henry’s enraged voice.  It turns out to be on a camcorder being carried by a homeless person.  He had recorded a video on it when he thought he was not going to make it to Tommy’s dance studio on time.  The homeless person directs Dr. Gil to the Brooklyn Bridge, where she finds Henry about to jump into the East River.  Despite her pleas and revealing all her problems to him, he plunges into the water anyway.  She runs down and gets him out of the water.  She wants to get him to a hospital, but he will not go until he sees Tommy.  To get there, they steal what ends up being the cab of the same driver Henry ran into with his car earlier that day.  They make it before the arbitrary deadline, and Dr. Gil takes Henry to the hospital after a heartfelt father and son reunion.  He dies eight days later, though not before making amends as he had hoped.  The final scene is of his loved ones spreading his ashes in the East River.

There are a lot directions to go for this Catholic reviewer with a film like The Angriest Man in Brooklyn, and for that I am thankful.  There is an obvious one with Aaron, who upon hearing Henry’s all-too-real hypothetical death scenario, said that he would go to the Temple.  I wish more Catholics would think of the Church and God in such moments.  Yet, it is God who Henry blames for all the bad things in his life.  To that end, he makes a rather interesting point.  He is trying to make it up to Tommy by explaining in his video his behavior over the past couple of years.  Henry says that love is not pure and generous, it is small and selfish.  For somebody who asks what kind of God would take one of his sons and lump on a whole bunch of other small annoyances, this kind of reaction is understandable.  Henry is, of course, wrong.  For one to abandon God, all the good in the world does become about oneself.  I would argue that whatever it is that he is defining, it is not love.  God is love, the very definition of it, and everything He does is “pure and generous.”  A selfish person looks at the loss of a loved one and believes God has committed a deeply personal negative act against them.  The truth is that only God has the wisdom to know the purpose behind all events, not just tragedy.  And trusting in Him is the beginning of wisdom.  Proverbs 9:10 basically says as much.  When one is grieving, such advice seems esoteric.  Yet, God’s understanding is greater than anything we can muster at any time.

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn is among the last movies done by Robin Williams before he passed away.  I must confess to thinking about this while watching the film because Williams, unfortunately, committed suicide.  I hope that this film, instead of adding to his depression, at least give him hope for a little while longer.  That is the ultimate message of this movie, that every second of life is worth it, and why I recommend it.