Cinema Verdict Review: Win Win

Win Win

OPENING: 03/18/2011

STUDIO: Fox Searchlight Pictures

RUN TIME: 106 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
In the game of life, you can’t lose ‘em all.

Opening Statement
After the highly-regarded successes of The Station Agent and The Visitor, writer/director Tom McCarthy returns with another fine effort; albeit a somewhat slighter, more formulaic one.

Facts of the Case
Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti, Cold Souls) is a down-on-his-luck attorney and the coach of local high school wrestling team. His team is struggling nearly as much as his law firm. Desperate to generate some cash, Mike takes advantage of an elderly client who is suffering from the early stages of dementia. After persuading the court to allow him to serve as the elderly client’s guardian, Mike dumps the old man into an assisted living home and simply accepts the large checks that come in the mail each month.

It’s shortly after this that Mike meets Kyle (Alex Shaffer), the old man’s teenage grandson. Kyle is quiet and a little rough around the edges, but generally a nice guy. His mother’s in rehab and he doesn’t really have anywhere to stay, so Mike and his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone) agree to let Kyle stay with them for a while. Attempting to give the kid something to do, Mike encourages Kyle to join the wrestling team. To Mike’s delight, Kyle is far and away the most talented wrestler the school has ever had. Soon, the scrappy little team actually has a shot at winning the state championship.

The Evidence
There are scenes in Win Win which you see coming several reels before they actually arrive. You know that Kyle’s mother is going to turn up at some point and cause some sort of complication. You know that Kyle is going to figure out the truth about what Mike is doing to his grandfather and that a lot of yelling will ensue. You know that the team is going to make it to The Big Match and there’s going to be some moment in which absolutely everything depends on Kyle. These scenes do indeed appear, and more often than not they play out the way you would expect them to. Win Win is a formulaic, predictable film in many ways, and while it’s not good enough to make that fact irrelevant (like David O. Russell’s The Fighter), it’s good enough to be worth watching, anyway.

That’s largely due to the fact that the characters are so well-drawn and so easy to spend time with. Giamatti’s casting is particularly crucial to the success of the film, as his sad-sack regret goes a long way towards permitting us to forgive him for engaging in some rather sleazy behavior. Mike isn’t a bad guy; he just acts like one on occasion in moments of desperation. Still, it’s an element of his character that seems refreshingly icky for a film like this–most movie coaches have considerably more superficial “flaws” (like spending too much trying to figure out how to lead their team to victory and unintentionally ignoring their family in process). Mike is such a nice guy in so many other ways; Giamatti plays him as a man constantly attempting to compensate for his weaknesses.

Likewise, Amy Ryan’s Jackie isn’t the typical cinematic coach’s wife, which is to say that she isn’t relegated to a dull blend of generic nagging and equally generic support. She’s a real human being and a compelling character in her own right; sharing some scenes with Shaffer that rank among the film’s best. Ryan and Giamatti also have splendid chemistry together, giving the onscreen marriage an appealingly lived-in feel. Shaffer also strikes some surprising notes, creating a character who proves far easier to get along with than you might suspect. Jeffrey Tambor and Bobby Cannavale add some lovely comic grace notes to the proceedings as Mike’s assistant coaches (watching the duo’s underplayed childish bickering is a delight).

The film is funny, but in a gentle way that provides a steady stream of chuckles rather than loud bursts of laughter. The midsection of the film in particular (which spends the most amount of time on the wrestling portion of the movie) has a lot of entertaining stuff; almost everything involving the interaction between the coaches is comic gold. By the time the dramatic theatrics of the third act arrive, we’ve developed such good will toward the characters that we care about their contrived situations and the predictable arguments which occur between them.

Closing Statement
I like Win Win–it’s a rather amiable cinematic experience and a better-than-average comedy–but it somehow lacks the resonance and depth of McCarthy’s previous outings. It’s worth a watch, but the characters are on a higher level of quality than the plot.

The Verdict
8/10