Win Win

Win Win

Win Win is a small low budget film that, from the trailers, I was afraid would be just another feel good underdog sports movie.  The only reason it caught my eye was because one of my favorite actors, Paul Giamatti, was starring in the lead role.  I love his ability to play the inwardly tormented and outwardly comedic everyman.  His farcically intense delivery and exaggerated facial expressions over things most of us find mundane and normal never cease to make me smile and make him exuberantly fun to watch in all of his movies (remember his role as ‘Pig Vomit’ in Howard Stern’s ‘Private Parts’).  His role as Harvey Pikar in ‘American Splendor’ proved his acting ability, but it’s his stature as a character actor which I find most endearing.

            I took a chance on Win Win and it was surprisingly good.  It’s the story of a New Jersey attorney named Mike Flaherty who is struggling to make ends meet in his personal law practice.  He is in dire financial straits and has started to have panic attacks. Mike finds  a questionable way of making money off one of his elderly clients by becoming his court appointed guardian.  You feel for Mike because he is able to rationalize this as his practice is about to go under and if he doesn’t he won’t be able to provide for his family.  Mike also moonlights as a wrestling coach for a perennially failing team at the local high school,

            The plan goes along fairly well until an unexpected visitor shows up in the form his client’s 16 year old grandson from Ohio named Kyle (Alex Schaffer).  Sitting on the doorstep of his grandfather’s house, Kyle seems adrift and reluctant to go back home to his ‘in rehab’ mother.  Mike and his wife Jackie (played with mature attractiveness by Amy Ryan) reluctantly take Kyle in to their home until things can be worked out.

            This is where the film could have gone terribly wrong, but didn’t.  Mike discovers that Kyle is an incredibly talented wrestler and has visions of him turning around his last place wrestling team. Visions of ‘The Bad News Bears’ or even the lesser known Mathew Modine wrestling film ‘Vision Quest’ popped into my head and I started preemptively shaking my head with anticipation of the clichés to come.  To my surprise, the focus of the movie did not turn to Kyle’s comeback and success in wrestling.  Even though that was a part of the film, it was a small part.  The film focused on Kyle bonding and growing to trust Mike and his middle class family from New Jersey.  While far from perfect, they provide him with a stability and acceptance he had never experienced before.  Kyle starts out as a grunting, monosyllabic teenager and slowly starts to grow and come out of his shell as Mike becomes the father figure he never knew.

            The sudden appearance of Kyle’s mother threatens to derail Kyle’s new found happiness.  Fresh out of rehab and looking to get her hands on a part of her father’s money, she looks to reclaim Kyle and to take him back to Columbus.  The movie’s drama and theme grows out of this struggle; the mother who is not fit to be a parent and the family that didn’t want Kyle to begin with struggling to keep him.

            The movie has a hard time trying to decide whether it wants to be a comedy or a drama.  Giamatti’s buffoonery at everything he does is always funny and his two best friends and Asst. Coaches, Jeffery Tambor and Bobby Cannavale are put in for almost exclusively comedic reasons.  However, the story of Kyle’s relationship with his mother and his attachment to his grandfather and Mike Flaherty’s family is all drama and interesting to watch.

            There are no explosions or intense thrills in this movie.  Like I said, it is a small quiet film about a normal middle class family trying to do what is right and opening their home to a troubled boy.  They don’t all have to be blockbusters.  Sometimes just a simple and ordinary human story that could happen to anyone of us can be engaging enough. 

I rate this *** 3 stars