Win Win

With only three feature films on his resume — The Station Agent, The Visitor and now Win Win — director Thomas McCarthy is proving to be one of the most interesting and original artist to step behind the camera in years. His secret is simple: he uses great actors to tell great stories. His latest movie is the story of a suburban lawyer named Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti) who comes up with a way to keep his practice alive and give his family some much-needed financial breathing room. He has an elderly client (Burt Young) who wants to spend his remaining years living in his home and not in some nursing facility. Flaherty tells him he will present his case to the court, but instead pulls a bit of a switch by making himself the legal guardian of his client so he can start collecting the money the state gives him for home-care assistance. Then Flaherty puts him in a nursing home anyway, telling his client it’s what the court ordered. Most directors would take an idea like that and turn it into either a lurid thriller or a silly comedy. For McCarthy, the story is just a framework for him to explore the lives of the people involved to see what makes them make the decisions that got them in so much trouble to begin with. He ups the ante by introducing the old man’s grandson Kyle (newcomer Alex Shaffer) into the mix. On the run from a family he can’t stand, Kyle seeks shelter with the Flaherty family, which leads to yet another level of complication in the story as the troubled young man and the crooked attorney bond over, of all things, high school wrestling.