Win Win

dir: Thomas McCarthy

When you watch a lot of movies, you get so used to the hysterical, overbearing, oversaturated general default setting of cinema, that when a relatively quiet flick comes out that treats (mostly) dramas between people in a sane manner, it seems strange.

Not bad strange, just not at the fever pitch of melodrama that people expect from their media, or I guess have expected for decades.

Thomas McCarthy specialises in films seemingly devoted to fairly ordinary people living lives of quiet desperation, alleviated only by their interactions with other more interesting people. The films meander along, some conflict seems to arise organically, forcing some kind of crescendo, and then people’s lives continue, hopefully in a slightly better way. Maybe it sounds like I’m being derisive, but it’s not intended.

Though the protagonists of his previous flicks and the settings are all different (The Station Agent, The Visitor and this one), that approach seems to hold as a constant. You know, in case I haven’t made it clear enough, it’s a gentle, meandering, believable, human way to get a film and a premise across.

Perhaps you can guess what the laziest and most obvious criticism of these flicks could be. Something that mimics ‘real’ life in too realistic a manner runs the risk of being like actual life, in other words, tedious and painful. It can sap the will to live.

But that’s not my take on these films, or on this film. I enjoyed it, as much as a flick like this can be enjoyed. The performances are strong and mostly not showy, and it’s always a delight to see Paul Giamatti play another in a long line of shmucks.

He’s somewhat less shmucky than usual as the lead here, but he’s still plenty shmucky. He’s a lawyer in some parochial bit of New Jersey, with little by way of work to keep his business solvent. He has a nice wife (Amy Ryan) and some nice kids, and everything’s small town and low stakes. I mean, the stakes would be high if you were the one trying to keep your business afloat, but we, in the audience, haven’t yet got a reason to care about his travails.

The manner in which the main character, Mike’s shmuckiness arises is that he manipulates a circumstance involving an old man with Alzheimer’s called Leo (Burt Young) in order to get some money. For a measly $1,500 a month, Mike has Leo removed from his house and placed in an old folk’s home, despite telling the court that he’s going to look after Leo himself.

It’s a pretty big lie to expect that there won’t be repercussions. We understand why Mike feels that he has to do this, especially since he figures Leo’s lost to the dementia fairies, or soon will be. And though we understand how much he needs the money, since he’s got no work, he doesn’t seem to be hurting that badly.

So, yeah, this is no noble thief we’re dealing with here, but we’re given enough to not loathe him entirely.

His choices regarding Leo lead to a whole bunch of other things happening, a kind of escalation through the rolling on of unintended consequences. The greatest embodiment of this is the arrival of Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a teenage boy with dyed blonde hair and an air of adolescent disaffection.

For reasons that aren’t entirely rational, but which mostly stem from Mike’s less-than-ethical behaviour, Mike ends up taking Kyle into his house. Kyle is Leo’s grandson, arrived on a vacant doorstep, quietly spoken yet always with that hint of surliness that adults treasure so much.

Throughout these and many other decisions, Mike sighs a lot and grimaces the grimace of someone who’s generally happy with his life, but who has been disappointed a lot of times. Partly responsible for it, and partly as a reaction to it, Mike coaches the local high school wrestling team. It’s not the wrestling where people dress up flamboyantly and jump from the top rope. It’s the far gayer kind where two guys writhe and roll around with their bodies in the closest proximity you can get with another person without voluntarily having sex with them.

Through strange coincidence, Kyle not only likes wrestling, and happily gets involved in the local school and local team, he’s an absolute superstar at it. He is so great at it, in fact, that he elevates all the people around him. He gives hope to the least of his brethren, and, through reflected glory or just by being near him, Mike and his best friend Terry (Bobby Cannavale), who is reeling from a recent divorce, and who feels great bitterness over the course his life has taken, also feel like winners.

Oh, jeez, you fucking sadsacks. Is there anything more pathetic than adults who try to live vicariously through the achievements of children?

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a criticism of the characters or the flick, it just reminds me how strong that temptation must be in people, and hence we get stage mothers and raging fathers, or stage fathers and raging mothers at kid’s sports events trying to make other people think they’re great just because their kid can do something.

I often thought the flick was going to make the point regarding this, as in, extending the selfishness of the Mike character into a commentary regarding this kind of stuff, but it’s played in the way that, though he is seemingly only interested in Kyle because he’s a wrestling star, it’s actually out of concern for the kid’s wellbeing that they eventually wish to keep looking after him.

Of course, I haven’t mentioned why Kyle’s even in this position. In perhaps the least fleshed-out bit of the story, Kyle’s mother (Melanie Lynskie) is a selfish drug addict, and she’s in rehab, which is why Kyle even sought out the only other family he’s got. When the mother hits town trying to profit from circumstances, everything that Mike has lied to bring into existence threatens to collapse around his ears.

And rightly so. The beauty of the flick is that a lot of this might seem like lazy, path-of-least-resistance stuff, but it really does feel organic and natural, in terms of the way the flick develops. It’s unhurried, and the performances are all uniformly great, because they’re low-key. Amy Ryan as Mike’s wife is especially fine in the way that she resists any urge to turn the story melodramatic when given opportunities that plenty of other actors wouldn’t have been able to let slide.

A teenager playing a teenager in theory should be relatively easy, but surely we’ve all seen plenty of tv shows and movies where actors fail even at those basic fundamentals. The film keeps Kyle mostly low-key, laconic and believable, and the most important part of this is that it stops him or his character from being annoying, at any stage. He’s also, in a way, the most honest and genuine person in the flick.

He does a really good job of showing the unique position a teenage boy can be in, where he’s intelligent enough to realise what’s going on around him, and to understand the repercussions of his actions. Due to his relative emotional immaturity, though and his numerous experiences of being let down by a junkie mother, he’s totally capable of rampaging to no positive effect.

I really enjoyed it. It’s stuff that isn’t ever made to set the box office alight, and it’s not exactly thrilling stuff. But as decent flicks go, it’s competent and enjoyable enough. It’s the stuff of life, with all the foibles and petty disappointments and victories that pepper our existence, all wrapped up in a believable and ‘lived-in’ package that was a pleasure to watch.

But, you know, too much gentle reality might be a terrible thing for some viewers. It might increase, instead of decrease, your desire for Captain Thor Lantern Priest Vampire-style entertainment instead.

And if that happens, God help us. God help us All!

7 times that kid’s got to be the only person in the United States with a tattoo of Ohio on his back out of 10

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“I did not think it would get this complicated” – no-one ever does – Win Win