Rated R for language
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Amy Ryan, Bobby Cannavale, Jeffrey Tambor, Alex Shaffer
Director: Tom McCarthy
When we first see Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), he is jogging on a dirt road. Two elderly runners pass with ease. He slows down... his need for exercise belied with every labored breath. The exhausted jogger stops, glances about with a facial expression that echoes perhaps the most perplexing of middle-aged philosophical queries... what is the point of this shit?
That sequence establishes the nature of Mike's situation with remarkable ease. A small time attorney by day and a high school wrestling coach by night, he resides in a comfortable New Jersey suburb with his devoted, resourceful wife Jackie (Amy Ryan) and their two daughters. We learn he is under tremendous stress bred from an increasing inability to keep his business solvent. He needs money.
The biggest pleasure in his life is coaching despite the fact that his team is the worst in the district. It's the nature of wrestling... stalking, grappling, gaining leverage, exploiting an advantage. He applies a similar mentality to his financial situation upon learning that being the caretaker for a court-appointed elderly client named Leo (Burt Young) who has been abandoned by his drug-addicted daughter could net him $1,500 a month. He tells the judge he will care to his needs at the man's home, but instead checks him into an assisted living facility and pockets the money.
Complications arise when the old man's grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer) arrives. With mom in rehab and granddad in assisted living, the boy has nowhere to live. He is temporarily taken in by Mike and Jackie. As it happens, Kyle is a wrestling virtuoso. Mike, his best friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale) and his assistant coach Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor) waste no time in enrolling their new protege in school. The team needs him.
Both areas of Mike's life have seemingly taken an upturn. That is, until Kyle's mother Cindy (Melanie Lynskey) comes calling for both her son and her father. Mike suspects that she's only out for her father's money. He may be right, but his suspicions are offset by the realization that he himself is engaged in a strikingly similar form of egregious behavior.
The film's success doesn't rest in plot points, but in the main character's gradual understanding of the dubiousness of his actions. That we see the life lesson to be learned before Mike does isn't a flaw in the filmmaking. It's kind of the point.
Mike is not a bad man; he's just gotten too skilled at personal justification. (His idea of cutting back on smoking involves purchasing cigarettes, removing one, lighting it, and throwing the remaining pack away. It's amazing what we can convince ourselves of.) He doesn't tell Jackie about the extra "income" because, as he puts it, he "doesn't want to freak her out" about their financial woes. The real reason is that he fears her intractable moral center.
One of the movie's best moments involves a courthouse confrontation between Mike and Kyle's mother. She demands both the money and her son. Mike counters with an offer... she can keep the money if she doesn't take Kyle away with her. It's almost maddening how each one clings to the reasoning in his/her arguments without sensing the pain those arguments inflict on the other.
Paul Giamatti is a consistently likable personality on screen. That's crucial here. He creates a character we refuse to judge, as we're a bit too cognizant of making our own bad decisions in the face of economic hardship.
"Win Win" doesn't quite have the resonance of McCarthy's previous works, and the ending seemed a bit too neat, involving one character's arbitrary change of heart. Still, this is a smart piece of filmmaking that forgoes preaching about the flaws in others to force us to confront the flaws in ourselves.
* * * out of * * * * stars
