Win Win - A Dramatic Comedy That Floors You

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer

A "dark comedy" is usually a tough sell with audiences, and typically manages to find a niche crowd at best. It's a shame, then, that writer/director Thomas McCarthy's new film is being marketed that way. Win Win is an acutely observed and flawlessly acted drama, with another terrific performance by Paul Giamatti as an ordinary man forced to make a series of difficult decisions to keep his family going. That the film is also seamlessly funny is a testament to director McCarthy's skill with his actors. (This from a guy best known to audiences as Dr. Bill, Ben Stiller's obnoxious brother-in-law from Meet The Parents.)

Giamatti is Mike Flaherty, an honest lawyer and high-school wrestling coach in small-town New Jersey about to lose his practice. When he realizes that he could make an extra $1500 a month by assuming guardianship of his elderly client Leo (Burt Young), Mike takes advantage of the man's beginning stages of dementia, places him in a home and collects the check.

He shares this plan with his best friend Terry (the scene-stealing Bobby Cannavale) but not with his wife Jackie (Amy Ryan). Mike's little arrangement is technically against Leo's will, since the old man just wants to go back home – Mike simply can't work, tend to his family and give Leo the proper care. So the old guy is cared for in the home, Mike keeps his head above water, with no one the wiser. Win-win, right?

Then, one day, Leo's 16-year-old grandson Kyle (the amazing Alex Shaffer) shows up, looking for the old man, who he's never met. Kyle's mother hasn't spoke to Leo in twenty years, and is in rehab in Ohio. Now Kyle wants to live with Leo, and Mike has to begin spinning a web of delicate lies to keep this arrangement going. He and Jackie take Kyle in. When the boy proves to be a gifted wrestler, Mike recruits him and his team starts to win. The talented new kid infuses Mike with new confidence and a sense of purpose. Everyone around him benefits, including Terry, who needs an outlet to keep from staking out his ex-wife's house and makes himself an assistant coach.

Talented or not, Kyle is troubled – and pretty heavily tattooed for a teenaged kid – but unlike other movie runaways, is respectful and gracious toward Jackie and Mike. He is straightforward and unpretentious, probably because he has no real influence, parental or otherwise. Kyle has to decide his own personality – luckily for everyone, he's a decent person. Everything starts looking up – and then Kyle's mother appears, with a lawyer in tow.

Win Win is a rare film, balancing an increasingly tense, complicated narrative with a comic buoyancy that never intrudes on the story. The recent Cedar Rapids tried for something close to this, but too often went for the gross-out. As Mike's scheme threatens to spiral out of his control, we empathize, partly because it's Giamatti, whose characters are so effortlessly lived in. Partly because – well, what would you do if it were your family and home on the line? McCarthy's film lets the other characters judge Mike, but allows us to see his situation as it is, as most of ours tend to be: complicated and beyond a simple right or wrong choice. McCarthy is also the director of the almost-universally acclaimed The Station Agent and The Visitor, both of which feature characters who act in refreshingly unexpected ways when faced with life's curveballs.

Any judgment of Mike from the audience is a reflection of how we judge ourselves when forced to make moral decisions like those in the film. The fate of the world may not hinge on the outcome, but the fate of our mortgage might. The central question of Win Win is worth asking, since the rest of us do anyway: can't we have it both ways? Usually not, but that doesn't stop us from trying.

Grade: A