An example of the violation of the law of Chekhov’s
gun that I
mentioned in a recent review — that is, the rule
that, “if in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it
must fire in the last act” — occurs in Thomas McCarthy’s enjoyable
Win Win. In an early scene we see the hero, Mike Flaherty
(Paul Giamatti) tinkering with a symbolic boiler in his New Jersey
lawyer’s office. Mike’s legal practice isn’t doing too well, and
neither is the boiler. Of the latter we are told that it very well
might explode unless it is fixed — and that there is not enough
money to fix it. If that’s not an invitation to the boiler to
explode at some strategic point later in the film, I don’t know
what is. But to Mr. McCarthy the boiler, its symbolic work done,
has no further interest and is heard from no more. Any subsequent
explosions will be only of the metaphorical kind.
Admittedly, it’s a small point, but it’s a flaw in the
movie’s construction, as is its waste of the great Jeffrey Tambor
as Stephen Vigman, Mike’s associate and his assistant wrestling
coach who more or less drops out of the movie half-way through,
having been given nothing of importance to do hitherto. The time
spent on Mike’s much less interesting friend Terry (Bobby
Cannavale) and his failed marriage also seems to me to be wasted,
as it adds little or nothing to the movie’s two main stories. One
of these is about Mike’s conscience and the breach of professional
ethics he commits to save his business, and the other is about a
young runaway named Kyle (Alex Shaffer) who transforms the fortunes
of his wrestling team.
Kyle is the grandson of Leo (Burt Young), an old man
drifting into senility at whose expense Mike commits the shady deed
aforementioned. Kyle, on the run from a neglectful mother (Melanie
Lynskey) back in Ohio, arrives in New Jersey in the vain hope of
getting from his grandfather some of the parental attention his
mother is unable or unwilling to give, but he ends up getting it
instead from Mike and his wife, Jackie (Amy Ryan), whose basic
decency and goodness is attested by their willingness, in effect,
to adopt him. But Mike’s ulterior motive, as suggested to us by
Kyle’s wrestling prowess, once again becomes the source of a
dramatic conflict that largely takes place within Mike’s
conscience. I hope I don’t have to issue a spoiler alert to mention
that conscience wins out in the end.
For that is the principal reason why, in spite of its
flaws, this is a movie worth watching. Hollywood used to turn out
this kind of vaguely inspirational and uplifting moral tale all the
time, but it has got out of the habit in recent years. This is
partly because the audience for first-run pictures used to be
middle-class adults but is now heavily weighted towards teenage
boys with little or no interest in moral questions. But it also has
to do with the general degradation of moral thought — not to say
morality itself — in our public life. In the media culture, the
only sin is the sin — if sin it be — of hypocrisy, so it’s not
too surprising that Mike’s moral crisis tends to be seen through
that lens too. At times we have the feeling that, to Mr. McCarthy,
whose earlier films The Station Agent and The
Visitor are similarly shot through with moral earnestness,
cares more that Mike has kept his moral peccadillo hidden from his
loved ones than that he committed it in the first place.
But when it comes to morally serious movies we must take
what we can get, and what we get in this case is a funny, poignant,
and empathetic look at the sort of quiet desperation that ordinary
middle-class life may come to. At one point as Kyle is about to
wrestle, Mike, a former high school wrestler himself but a more
dogged than talented one, asks him: “What’s it like to be as good
as you are?”
“I don’t know,” Kyle replies. “I guess it feels like I’m
in control of everything, you know?”
“I do,” says Mike. And so do we, even though such a state
of control is likely to be for us as it is for Mike only
aspirational.
