Thomas McCarthy | Win Win / 2011

a far from perfect paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Thomas McCarthy (screenplay, based on a story by McCarthy and Joe Tiboni, and director) Win Win / 2011

 

Thomas McCarthy’s gentle comedy, Win Win, uses as its title what I presume is an ironic statement. True, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), facing financial difficulties, with necessary home and office repairs looming before him, might hope to “win” some extra cash by taking over the guardianship of a local elderly citizen, Leo Poplar (Burt Young) of his pleasant, if down-and-out New Jersey town. And yes, his caring for Poplar accidently brings about the appearance of the old man’s grandson, Kyle Timmons (Alex Shaffer), who just happens to be a remarkable wrestler, which, given Flaherty’s role as a part-time wrestling coach for a constantly losing team, briefly brings him and his friends, Stephen Vigman (Jeffrey Tambor) and Terry Delfino (Bobby Cannavale) some local attention and acclaim. But if this is winning, it is from a loser’s vantage point.

 

    Indeed, nearly all the characters of this loving investigation into the American Dream, have been so used to losing that they couldn’t possibly comprehend what it means to truly achieve success. Giamatti portrays Flaherty as a man so accustomed to being defeated that his whole body, like the furnace in his rickety law office, clinks and clunks with the possibility of an inner explosion. Hiding that possibility from his loving wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan) and two daughters, Flaherty, on his early morning runs with his high school buddy, Terry, he, nonetheless, admits to being near to a complete breakdown, spiritually and physically.

      Terry himself is on the verge of psychological meltdown as he obsesses over and stalks his former wife, now shacking up with a local carpenter. Like Flaherty, he admits that even at the height of his high-school athletic career he was a lousy athlete, and, apparently, his life after has been no more successful.

      Flaherty’s fellow coach, “Vig” is now so elderly he can hardly demonstrate the wrestling maneuvers he is asked to display to his equally despondent students.

       Flaherty’s new “responsibility,” Leo, is suffering from increasing dementia, and has long ago given up on his drug-dependent daughter, missing in Ohio, writing her out of his will and leaving his evidently substantial estate to the city for the establishment of a park in his name.

      And, finally, there is the Flahertys’ new adoptee, Kyle—Leo’s unannounced and unknown grandson, who shows up unexpectedly at Leo’s doorstep a few days after Flaherty has planted the old man, despite Leo’s protests, in a local nursing home—who appears to be a blonde-haired volcano of sublimated anger, in response to the years he’s suffered from his mother’s abuse of and abandonment of him.

      Only Flaherty’s wife, Jackie, given her constant empathy and loving demeanor—on the verge of a kind of obliviousness of reality— seems to be a winning personality in this total loser society.

      Despite the fact that this is a world of losers, or, perhaps because of it, we sympathize and even grow to love these very ordinary people—whom, fortunately, McCarthy never sentimentalizes nor forces them into corners as small-town eccentrics—and wish that we too could believe that things for them are now looking up. But we also know that the other, metaphorical shoe has to drop, which it does, with slightly frightening effects, when Kyle’s “missing” mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey) suddenly shows up with a lawyer beside her.

     They know that Flaherty has not only taken over the guardianship of Cindy’s father for the fee of $1,500, after depositing him in an assisted-living home, and have come to claim both the father (with his hefty estate) and son.

      Recognizing the error (and attached immorality) of his ways, Flaherty is willing to give up the monthly fee in order to protect both his older client and his now appealing young board—who recognizing the truth of what has happened to his grandfather, purposely loses the final wrestling match through excessive force and rejects his new would-be model parent, running off once again to camp out in his grandfather’s abandoned home. In short, if there was ever a “win-win” possibility, it has been destroyed by the very structure of these losers’ world. “Winning,” in the grand mythologies of American myth, is inconceivable for these loveable, ordinary folk, which is what, in turn, makes these figures so recognizably human.

 

     What we have perhaps forgotten, McCarthy suggests, is that these human failures—like most of us—nonetheless do care and feel deep love as do the Flahertys, who finally facing the ordinary truths of their lives, determine to fight to preserve their human commitments.

       Had the writer-director permitted forces to proceed to a real court trial, we realize, this committed family might surely have lost, and both Leo and Kyle would have been shuttled off to Columbus, Ohio to live out their lives in further perfidy. But McCarthy, fortunately is a moralist, and saves the day by remembering that Cindy, herself, is also a loser, willing to settle for Flaherty’s offer to pay her his guardianship fee, freeing her from having to pretend to take on the responsibilities of human relationships to which she has never been able to commit.

       So what if Flaherty has to take on yet another job as a late night bartender to make ends meet? Did anyone ever bother to tell him that the paradise wherein he lives might not be everything to which it pretends? Flaherty is fortunately a born fighter for the vision he has, perhaps unfortunately, ascribed to.  

Los Angeles, December 1, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2015).