Writer/director Thomas McCarthy has a very straight-forward, frank style to his comedies. He makes movies that are totally set in our world, inhabited by characters who we could easily know as our neighbors (or ourselves) who get into difficult situations partly because of their own doing and partly because they have bad luck. His latest film, Win Win, explores how when stuck inside a world of deep malaise, people do dumb things for good reasons, and that, as with life, stuff generally works out in the end.
Mike (Paul Giamatti) is a suburban lawyer in New Jersey who has a small practice that he is struggling to keep afloat. He's married to a wonderful, loving woman, Jackie (Amy Ryan), who takes care of their two kids and has a very sensible head on her shoulders. Mike is also the wrestling coach of the local high school, where his team is one of the worst in the area. He loves wrestling and working with the kids, but the team's mediocrity and the floundering of his work is getting to him.
As part of an elaborate and unethical scheme, Mike becomes the guardian for one of his elderly clients, Leo (Burt Young... Paulie from the Rocky movies) for which he gets a few thousand dollars a month. One day Leo's estranged grandson, Kyle (Alex Shaffer), shows up unannounced and Mike feels obligated to take him in until his mother (who is in jail and rehab) can come collect him from Ohio. Kyle, a champion high school wrestler, joins Mike's team and starts to make an impact on their record and the structure of Mike and Jackie's house beings to help him. The problem, of course, is that this could all fall apart if Mike's scheme is exposed.
This is a particularly well written script. I really like the structure of this story, going from order to chaos to order, but in a very natural, understandable way. After it ties up in the end it is clear how we got to that point. It does not feel overly-manipulated by the writer, which happens much more often in movies than I'd like. It seems like more often than not, writers have an idea for a story and an ending and put a bunch of filler in the middle for no reason that moves along clumsily to that end point. The plot here winds along very organically, which fits in well with the matter-of-fact style of the film.
McCarthy loves the mediocrity and sadness of Northern New Jersey (those words are my judgement, not his). Unlike directors like Todd Solondz or Kevin Smith who delight in the weirdness of the place and paint caricatures of it, McCarthy's New Jersey is very direct: a suburban area that has a life apart from the big city it is next to, but is somehow a place of lost dreams. Life is what it is, in this place. It's not romantic, it's not silly, it's just a bit grimy but mostly good.
My biggest problem with the film comes down to this issues of naturalness, or lack thereof, where the script gets a bit jumbled. Mike's friend and business associate is Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor) a CPA who he shares the office with. Vigman is his assistant wrestling coach and good for a funny line here and there (Tambor is typically dorky, bitter and hilarious here). Unfortunately McCarthy also includes another character, Terry (Bobby Cannavale), Mike's best friend who is going through a mid-life crisis and sees helping Kyle and the wrestling team as some sort of mid-life mission. The problem is that there is simply not enough material here for there to be two friend/coach/confidant characters. It would have been better if these two characters had been merged into one. Cannavale's tone is also too jerky, too frat-boy for the film, which is otherwise sorta subtle and dark and clever.
Amy Ryan has become one of my favorite actresses in recent years with her work in The Wire, Gone Baby Gone, a comedic role on The Office and the HBO series In Treatment. She's always fantastic and never overdone. Here she continues this great streak as a woman who you almost feel bad for (she's very average) until you realize she's probably the strongest and most sensible characters in the film. She also does the most impeccable life-long-New Jerseyite accent I've heard in awhile.
Perhaps the best thing McCarthy does in this movie is to make Paul Giamatti somewhat likable. I think this is his most natural, normal, calm character since he played Pig-Vomit in Private Parts (he was brilliant as Harvey Pekar, but Pekar was a weird guy very much up the Giamatti explosive alley). Giamatti has become almost unwatchable for me as each one of his characters reaches a new depth of sadness and misanthropy. Here he's just a normal schlub with normal life problems on his back. He tries to figure out a way out of his situation, but digs himself deeper into a hole. This normal, every-manness of the character is totally the core of this film. It's a lot of fun.
Stars: 3.5 of 4
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