Win Win‘s credentials are truly promising: writer-director Tom McCarthy has made two acclaimed indie features (The Station Agent and The Visitor), and the film’s marvellous leads Paul Giammati and Amy Ryan are ably served by a great supporting cast, but in the end the film doesn’t equal the sum of its parts. It’s not a bad film by any means, as all involved are too good for it to be a complete waste of time, but it just doesn’t satisfy in the way that this meeting of talent should.
Mike Flaherty (Giammati) is a typical suburban dad, a lawyer with a struggling practice and financial worries that he hides from his wife Jackie (Ryan). Mike’s clients are the elderly, and an opportunity presents itself for Mike to stay financially afloat: all he has to do is become the guardian of Leo (Burt Young), a client suffering from dementia, for which he will be paid a monthly stipend. Mike’s real passion is wrestling, and he wants more than anything to build a winning team at his local high school, aided and abetted by a friend with whom he shares office space, CPA Stephen Vigman (Arrested Development‘s Jeffrey Tambor). Leo also help Mike with his wrestling conundrum (the team is terrible) in an entirely indirect way when his troubled grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), whose mom is in rehab, arrives on Mike’s doorstep looking for his grandfather, whom he’s never met. Kyle, Mike soon discovers, is a champion wrestler who turned his back on the sport, and Mike manipulates Kyle just as he has manipulated his grandfather, persuading him to live in his house (over his wife’s protests) and enrol in school so that he can wrestle and hopefully give Mike’s dream a shot at becoming reality.
One would hope that a director with as deft a touch as McCarthy would take this all too obvious set-up and confound our expectations, but unfortunately he doesn’t, and the path of Mike’s and Kyle’s redemption is clearly signposted, but while the story’s payoffs disappoint, there is much to like in the performances and interplay of the cast. Newcomer Alex Shaffer is a very believable conflicted teenager who simply wants a semblance of a family to belong to, and the relationship that develops between Alex and Amy Ryan’s Jackie is lovely to watch unfold, as she moves from feelings of distrust to tenderness. McCarthy’s previous films have centred on odd relationships between unlikely parties, and their’s is another to add to that canon. Bobby Cannavale, whose friendship with Peter Dinklage was the heart of The Station Agent, is endearing as Mike’s successful but embittered best friend Terry, a man desperately seeking to be part of something (a family, a wrestling team) that can help pull him out of his post divorce anger and loneliness.
Paul Giammati’s face is a wonder of contemporary cinema; hangdog, happy, bemused or bewildered, he utilises a subtle arsenal of expression that is tremendous fun to watch. Amy Ryan is also an actor of great expressiveness who knows how to use the camera, and their portrayal of marriage feels more emotionally truthful (particularly in her unspoken, loving acceptance when she knows that he is not being entirely honest with her) than many screen marriages.
Engaging performances aside, one is left with the feeling of having watched a lot of major talent at work in a very minor entry in the current wave of sentimental, gently affirmative American comedy-dramas.
[Rating:2.5/5]
