Win Win

When was it decided that wrestling was a sign of sensitivity? It was implied that the troubled teen of The Kids Are All Right might be sending his brah a love letter every time he held him in a headlock. Now, in Win Win, in defiance of the sum of modern hyperconsciousness—and codes that have been programmed into every halfway savvy comedy since 2005—the gay subtext has been revoked. Kyle (Alex Shaffer), the misunderstood kid du jour, finds his way by fighting; when he pins his opponents, he has his demons by the horns. No wonder he’s a champ.

Kyle is practically a foundling—the nominal ward of his rather nominal grandfather Leo (Burt Young, whose characters’ screws were never too tight), himself the ward of his court-appointed attorney, Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti). A normally scrupulous lawyer, whose expanding family and modest practice are struggling to adjust to straitened times, Mike has taken on this responsibility so that he can receive an annuity from the state of New Jersey; Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), Leo’s meth-addict daughter and Kyle’s mother, is M.I.A. somewhere in Ohio. Enter Kyle—a bleached-blond, outsize stork dropping, waiting, in headphones, on grampa’s stoop. Unable to contact Cindy himself, Kyle is “adopted” by the Flahertys, too. He shadows Mike, who coaches the high school wrestling team, at practice; joins the team; and becomes its great white-haired hope. This laconic waif—who only looks like a “bad influence”—goes cold turkey on cigarettes and starts running laps at four A.M.; his opacity now registers as quiet charisma, and he befriends everyone, including the team pipsqueak (David Thompson). Even Mike’s wealthy pal Terry (Bobby Cannavale), whose dirty mind is doing laps of its own—around his ex-wife—is inspired. He becomes an assistant coach. Neither Mike nor Terry were all-stars when they hit the mat in high school; but now they have Kyle to live through—and, for the first time in ages, victories to look forward to.

Win Win never questions this vicariousness, which is sometimes the bane of parent-student athlete relationships. (Just ask the Emilio Estevez of The Breakfast Club.) But Tom McCarthy, who directed and wrote the script—he shares the story credit with Joe Tiboni, an elder-law attorney who was on the wrestling squad with him in high school—shows us how avidness for sports can transcend its value as simple escapism for people in trouble: a link that’s usually as broad as the shoulders of E.S.P.N. pundits, and thus an easy target for scoffers. Maybe the movie succeeds because it transcends simple escapism without ever transcending escapism itself. In the end, Kyle’s wins may signal long-term dividends but only short-term relief; Mike’s financial situation doesn’t improve. The film’s problem-play mechanics, and the neorealist look and sensibility, outsmart the sports narrative beneath—and yet Win Win thrives on its residual inspiration. Cannavale seems at first to have the ear-achingly obvious function of being the fount of enthusiasm that soaks through the dry flakes of indie irony; I felt the same way about him in McCarthy’s The Station Agent. He’s so in-your-face he seems skin deep. And yet we come to understand that all of Terry’s feelings are amplified; he needs this diversion; he has a bull horn attached to his heart.

As a character, Kyle is a little hard to swallow, too. This kid quits smoking at the drop of his headgear; gives no indication of being tempted by drugs; and his libido is a little lacking for a 17-year-old. (Unless we’re to assume that that gay subtext only comes to the surface in the locker room.) I could get by on what we get of Kyle for the first half—that voice, so infrequent, perhaps out of shame for being so nasal; those beady eyes, so intense and concentrated you could power a nuclear submarine with them. I wouldn’t blame the role’s shortcomings on Shaffer, a state-champion wrestler rather than child actor; in an interview he compares Kyle to an abused dog, and when the former owner (the underrated Lynskey) returns, he gets his bite back. The young actor isn’t tall, but has a slender frame that matches up with stouter-than-usual, soft-featured Giamatti. It’s good to see Giamatti playing a full person again; he gets one of the two line readings that cinch the movie. The first is when the coach stresses to Kyle, in a huddle, that “This is your place.” The second is spoken by Mike’s wife Jackie (Amy Ryan). In a rage, this Jersey girl tells Kyle that they love him; but it sounds as if “love” has been put in place of a different four-letter word. Ryan takes the shrill roar out of Melissa Leo’s working-class lioness; she’s a little broad at times, but the crunch of a tough cookie is a sound appropriate to this setting. She helps to redeem a stereotype.

I don’t know when this film was first conceived, but the so-called Great Recession, which has proven particularly malignant to the livelihoods of people like Mike Flaherty, has given his already fragile situation an extra boost of poignancy. There’s a dangerous downside to escapism in times like these; and though it’s not, and doesn’t need to be, in McCarthy’s purview, it’s there, lurking underneath—a hiding spot that can take such surprising forms as, say, a politician’s birth certificate. The real victory of Win Win is that it reminds us what we’re escaping from.