I went into
Win Win with relatively few expectations. Multi-hyphenate (writer, director, actor)
Thomas McCarthy did write and direct two of my favorite films of the past decade,
The Visitor and
The Station Agent. However, he also acted in
Little Fockers, so it was a pretty even playing field.
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Let me just say now that
Win Win is as close to a perfect film as I have seen in the past few years. It’s a quiet, unassuming movie that grabs the audience with wonderful character notes, impeccable acting, and natural dialogue and scene progression. It follows the life of Mike Flaherty (played by Paul Giamatti), a New Jersey lawyer and wrestling coach who suffers from anxiety attacks brought on by the stress of a failing practice, an about-to-fall-over tree in his front yard, money problems, the lies he’s telling his wife (the wonderful Amy Ryan), and the general, self-perceived suckiness of his life. Through a series of gentle lies, he takes on guardianship of one of his clients in order to stave off financial ruin. He soon takes responsibility, not only for his elderly client (Burt Young’s Leo Poplar), but also for the old man’s abused, wrestling savant grandson Kyle Timmons, played with stone-faced, flat-voiced depth by newcomer Alex Shaffer. Mike finds a joy through Kyle’s skill in the wrestling arena but is plagued by the knowledge that the lies he has constructed may fall down at any moment.
In his previous films, McCarthy specialized in men separate themselves from the world only to have life forced onto them by outside forces. Peter Dinklage’s Finbar McBride in
The Station Agent, Richard Jenkins’s Walter McVale in
The Visitor, and Ed Asner’s Carl
Fredricksen in Pixar’s
