Tom McCarthy (2011)
Paul Giamatti’s face is his fortune and his limitation, in terms of casting anyway. The protruding eyes and the saggy jowls – the self-aware humour and dogged intelligence behind them – are distinctive: it’s hard to think of any current film actor who does sad sack resilience as well as him. Naturally empathetic, he’s uncomfortable playing someone meant to be dislikeable (viz The Last Station). Giamatti enjoyed a great success on television playing President John Adams but lack of authority has been an essential ingredient of his best-known characters on the cinema screen to date. Win Win begins with a back view of a jogger – an unremarkable, rather shapeless figure – who’s passed by two other runners, one on either side of him. The man in the middle stops and Giamatti turns to face the camera. The music we hear (by Lyle Workman) is wryly, weedily hopeful. Then the writer-director Tom McCarthy moves into an accumulation of irritations and minor, it’s-gonna-to-be-one-of-those-days setbacks in the Giamatti character’s home and place of work. The effect of these opening sequences is dispiriting: the material feels predetermined and boxed in and there are still a hundred minutes to go.
The protagonist of Win Win is Mike Flaherty, a struggling New Jersey lawyer with a wife and two young daughters to support. In the evenings, he gives his time to coaching a consistently hopeless high-school wrestling team. Mike appears in court on behalf of an elderly client Leo, with early Alzheimer’s and who’s judged by social services unable to look after himself any longer. Mike offers to become Leo’s guardian so that Leo, who has plenty of money, can remain in his house, as he’s anxious to do. Mike is a decent man but he’s desperate too: the real incentive here is the $1,500 monthly commission payable. He can’t afford the time to look after an unsupervised Leo so once the court has granted Mike the guardianship, he moves the old man into a nursing home. Then Leo’s teenage grandson Kyle arrives in town, having run away from home in Ohio: he turns out to be a star turn wrestler and needs a roof over his head. In due course, Kyle’s feckless, penniless mother Cindy, estranged from both her father and her son and just out of rehab, enters the story too.
This isn’t, to put it mildly, original plotting and Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor) doesn’t improve matters by the way he conceives the people in the story. They’re essentially ‘ordinary’ people: the implicit condescension – and McCarthy’s ‘humane’, sympathetic treatment of them – is grating. I was the only person in Screen 4 of the Richmond Odeon: it may have been partly that unusual situation that made me restless, looking around the theatre and at my watch every so often, but I think it was also an expression of resistance to the film’s calculated smallness. Yet McCarthy seems to be a much more nimble director of actors than he is a writer; and the cast is so good that they come close to alchemising Win Win. Giamatti is in all respects the star of the show. His skill and wit (and taste) transcend and illuminate the character he’s playing, make you feel that, if this actor were more facially nondescript, he could move closer towards the range of roles Gene Hackman achieved (and which Richard Jenkins deserves).
Giamatti gets excellent support from Amy Ryan as Mike’s plain-speaking but totally loyal wife Jackie, Bobby Cannavale as his droll, anxiously extrovert buddy Terry, and Jeffrey Tambor, as the dyspeptic Vigman – an accountant whose business is next door to Mike’s and who’s co-coach to the wrestling team until Terry muscles in. Burt Young (the brother-in-law in the Rocky films) is nuanced and strongly expressive as Leo; so is Alex Shaffer as Kyle, whose determined monotone is often very funny. Kyle seems determined to say as little as he can (he swallows words and syllables wherever possible): you come to accept this as more than adolescent elision – as part of Kyle’s wariness of letting anyone see into or get close to him. (Shaffer, at the age of seventeen, really did win the New Jersey State Wrestling Championship in 2010.) David Thompson (the timorous beanpole on the wrestling team) and Nina Arianda (Mike’s secretary) play more broadly but enjoyably too. Margo Martindale is, as always, good in a small role, that of Cindy’s lawyer.
Tom McCarthy, having decided to make a film centred on unpretentious, law-abiding people, lacks the courage of his convictions. I liked the way that Amy Ryan suggested the near-inevitability for Jackie of doing the right thing: when Kyle arrives, she knows she and Mike can’t afford another mouth to feed; she makes clear her husband knows she knows but she takes Kyle in as a matter of course. She’s convincingly incredulous too when she finds out what Mike’s done to prop up his ailing practice and augment the household income. But McCarthy doesn’t give Paul Giamatti much opportunity – in spite of the fact that wrongdoing seems to be a novelty and that the Flahertys are churchgoing Catholics – to get across Mike’s guilty feelings about his exploitation of Leo: this is just stored up for eventual use to bring events to a head.
The appearance of Kyle’s mother is also impelled largely by plot requirements but Cindy, as played by Melanie Lynskey, injects a welcome tension into the proceedings. It’s funds that Cindy’s after (or which she thinks will solve her problems) and you wish, like Mike, Jackie and Kyle, she’d go away: as she knows (and says), she’s spoiling everything. But she is so screwed up that you feel sorry for Cindy too: Lynskey gives her a helpless brittleness that’s grippingly sad. Once Cindy’s been paid off and departed the scene, Win Win settles down into a half-happy ending – and an effective closing scene. Kyle’s aggressive feelings towards his mother cause him to blow his big chance in wrestling when she appears in the audience but, after she’s gone, he moves in with the Flahertys permanently. He’ll stay on at school and try for college, even if it’s not on a sports scholarship. Mike, lesson learned, lowers his sights in supplementing his salary. He comes home from work in the evening, then puts on a clean shirt and tie to go out again. We wonder where. Cut to Terry, walking into a bar and ordering a drink. Cut to the barman.
24 May 2011
