[Editorial note: I had mistakenly said in my blog entry on The Station Agent that director Tom McCarthy’s family lives in Somerset County, N.J., but this is incorrect, and I corrected that claim there: they are in Union County, specifically in New Providence, N.J. (fictionalized), where Win Win is set (and from which, though the movie seems to have been filmed mostly in Long Island, it does have some shots, including a business-district intersection I am familiar with). Also, I have no business interest in McCarthy’s films or business affairs, nor do I know any of the people involved in his productions; I do not write on them as I do because of any such arrangement.]
[Edited for errors 3/4/12.]
Not only are Tom McCarthy’s films detail-oriented—realistic about the way middle class, suburban Americans live, with this indicated by subtly presented details (glimmers of lifestyle, courteous gestures, revealing exchanges). His films also concern character: not only are central characters easily identifiable as to a constellation of traits and “telling comments,” but even peripheral characters can be significant to the story or memorable enough complements.
This is an especially useful strategy to discussing this film because, when it comes to looking (critically or sympathetically) at lawyers, you can take one of two approaches that echo the two tendencies within law, the general and the detail-oriented: you can make broad generalizations (such as to make satirical depictions, or extremely contemptuous remarks, or lawyer jokes, etc.) or you can look at specific situations—taking a sort of “fact-based, equity-oriented” approach, to put it in legal terms—and highlight, assess, etc., as you will based on a fair evaluation of the properly understood facts. (And sometimes you may look fairly at a real situation and then still reasonably make fairly grounded statements that seem like pitched satire.) Win Win, I should note, is a way to look at a lawyer and say, not just for the sake of “giving lawyers their due,” they are people too, but it is also a way to show what it means to be fair in assessing how someone went a little off the track: look at the facts, look at the context in which he or she made choices: be fair.
When we later look at the Coen brothers’ films’ treatment of attorneys, we'll see a range of approaches there, from the satirical to what could be called the dispassionately “clinical.” Their 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, which I like, is a sleek film (in development for about eight years, and meant for a more mainstream audience than some of their immediately previous works) that is quite pitched in its satire, about divorce attorneys among big-money Hollywood types. But in a way, it seems a little out of place today: its satire seems from a more innocent time (which is an odd way to assess a Coens film, I think). Today, when not less than ever before, we can read literal accounts of breakdowns in American business and other areas of life and say it reads like satire, then when we hear of a breakdown in attorney ethics, it seems we ought to shelve the tendentious readings of attorneys, put away the lawyer jokes, and look at the specific “case at hand,” and be fair. (Other times we might want to return to the lawyer jokes and caustic criticisms, which I hope to do in my next blog entry.)
You see the opening title sequence to Win Win and an average young viewer might ask, “What kind of wimpy dog-and-pony show do we have here?” Don’t be a wise-ass.
The overall plot of Win Win, surrounding Paul Giamatti’s Mike Flaherty, who has the biggest burden in the story, can be summed the following way: an elder-law attorney, with a family with young children at home, is experiencing slowed business, and needs extra money. A senior citizen who comes his way as an ordinary client is about to be deemed incapacitated due to dementia, but he lives in his own house. There is the option for the state to be his guardian…but Mike decides to arrange to be the man’s guardian, and a fee of $1,500 stipulated to be paid out of the man’s estate will thus go to him. Meanwhile, against what the man wants, and despite what Mike promised to do in the court hearing in which the guardianship was established, Mike places the man in an assisted-living facility in town, in order to cut down on his work on behalf of the man, and the man’s house remains unoccupied. Mike gets the money, and at first all seems OK.
Then the elderly man’s grandson, off a bus from Ohio, arrives to meet his grandfather (the boy’s mother has been in drug rehab). Mike, who is a high school wrestling coach, finds the boy is a highly skilled wrestler. After having previously taken the boy into his household, Mike enrolls the boy in the town’s high school, puts him on the wrestling team, and the team starts acquiring some successes in its matches. Then the boy’s mother appears on the scene, interested in becoming her father’s guardian (again, for the money, at least in part). Conflict ensues, and the woman, well enough meaning in her own right (if a bit pathetic), with the aid of her own attorney, has it revealed—to the boy and to Mike—that Mike placed the elderly man in a facility against the man's desire to live at home, and against Mike's voiced intentions in court. Ultimately, Mike remains the man’s guardian, but agrees to pay the mother the fee; she goes back home to Ohio, and the boy remains with Mike’s family to finish out school. This sums what may seem a labyrinthine plot, but it shows the nexus of affairs in which Mike makes his decisions—for the sake of his family and as an attorney—that result in a crisis of conscience for him.
More aspects of the plot—I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for potential viewers—will be seen below. But because McCarthy’s films are less about plot than about human relationships, here it is especially apropos to take the characters singly and, through reviewing them, see what kind of whole of a movie they help comprise.
A story about a lawyer pursuing a relatively modest scratch-ass living becomes richer for all his meaningful relationships. And as with his other films, we appreciate how much McCarthy can do with films that draw less meaning out of plot than out of encounters, moments of personal recognition, and moderately important turns in affairs.
A family of colorful characters—orienting you to community and historical context
* Jackie, Mike’s wife, played by Amy Ryan, seems in a way a standard-issue middle-class Mom, with some New Jersey edge: Ryan’s portrayal of her as a bit wry and dry—a bit much of a sourpuss for a mother of children as young as her character has—seems to me a little out of step with McCarthy’s tone for his stories and characters—not that he usually makes these insipid—but maybe it’s adequate for a story of a middle class family a little under the gun with post-2008 pressures. Maybe some find her adequate for this story; but of this cast, she jibes the least with my taste (while maybe her style was per McCarthy’s intention), though even that is not by much. Fortunately, her “Jersey tough” side, marrying its competitive attitude (here, mother-versus-mother) with her instinctual motherly warmth toward Kyle, becomes apropos when, after Mike’s attempt to send Kyle home by bus, she is newly moved to want to help Kyle, the central young-person character, when it becomes evident to her he is neglected by his mother back in Ohio (to only sketch the situation), after he has been somewhat adrift coming to New Jersey, originally to see his grandfather.
* “Vig,” or Steven Vigman, C.P.A., an accountant played by Jeffrey Tambor, is the office-building mate of Flaherty, who himself is an attorney; Vig is tall and expressive, and he seems to occupy a good second-fiddle role to Flaherty, such as in chatting with familiar, harried good sense about the problems with the deteriorating furnace in their office building, which is a converted old house; and, as we find, he is a fellow coach of the wrestling team (at a fictionalized high school in New Providence, N.J.) that ends up being a key focus of the film.
* Kyle Timmons, played by non-actor (and real high school wrestler) Alex Shaffer, is made somewhat outlandish on the surface: laconic and with weirdly bleached shaggy hair as Kyle, Shaffer may not seem like star material, but here that is beside the point. He exhibits the “awkward age” (or “in between”) quality—as homely as a bare foot, and as simple and direct as a shy young teen can be: and you would expect this in a teen who is experiencing intermittent absence of his sole parent and who cares about not much else than some kind of ongoing genuine family connection and, in a certain male way, utilizing his prodigious wrestling skill—which becomes a sort of ticket to fulfillment for both himself and Mike Flaherty when the latter incorporates him into his high school wrestling team.
* Abby (played by Clare Foley) is one of Mike and Jackie’s two daughters (the other is too young to have much of a speaking role at all), is supposedly six, and is a sort of family-friendly-film moppet. She has something of the role of Drew Barrymore’s Gertie in E.T., except here there’s no emetic cuteness or Walt Disney sugar. While she utters “out of the mouths of babes” comments, this is a big-eyed moppet with a toughened edge suited to the film: the earliest scene has her cursing when a window decoration falls as she awakens on a sunny morning (curse words apparently are what solely earn this film an R rating). This moment sets the film’s tone nicely: we’re in middle-class family-land, with little girl greeting a new day, but the moppet utters an epithet; we find her parents later duly disapproving of her language at the breakfast table, but it turns out (later still) that Dad freely effuses the same way when faced with bad news like the worrying furnace: language that got the film an R rating. In some sense, this is a family under the gun, and not taking it like mealy-mouthed wimps.
* Abby (played by Clare Foley) is one of Mike and Jackie’s two daughters (the other is too young to have much of a speaking role at all), is supposedly six, and is a sort of family-friendly-film moppet. She has something of the role of Drew Barrymore’s Gertie in E.T., except here there’s no emetic cuteness or Walt Disney sugar. While she utters “out of the mouths of babes” comments, this is a big-eyed moppet with a toughened edge suited to the film: the earliest scene has her cursing when a window decoration falls as she awakens on a sunny morning (curse words apparently are what solely earn this film an R rating). This moment sets the film’s tone nicely: we’re in middle-class family-land, with little girl greeting a new day, but the moppet utters an epithet; we find her parents later duly disapproving of her language at the breakfast table, but it turns out (later still) that Dad freely effuses the same way when faced with bad news like the worrying furnace: language that got the film an R rating. In some sense, this is a family under the gun, and not taking it like mealy-mouthed wimps.
Abby functions largely to provide “moppet relief” in different ways, among them: echoing her elders’ comments as if puzzling at the hidden meaning of adults’ usages; asking a question in a way that brings out the film’s “hard times” theme (to her mother’s news that her father is outside running, Abby says “From what?”); or simply responding with a quietly droll smile. She also has a running theme of asking if others will play croquet with her, which, given the winter setting of the story, means it doesn’t happen until a springtime scene at movie’s end. This all strikes me as nicely funny and, while risking being a trite kind of character, somehow seems fresh enough here.
* The most colorful character is Terry Delfino, played by Bobby Cannavale, who lent his earthy loquaciousness to McCarthy’s The Station Agent. Cannavale has played on the stage too, such as his role as an addict in The [expletive] With the Hat in New York, with praising notices in the newspapers in spring 2011. Cannavale projects the sort of personality I appreciate a lot more now than, say, 30 years ago, when you could also see his personality style in certain peers—colorful with a sort of streetwise bonhomie, a quick-witted style of talking germane to people of Latin background (he is mixed Cuban and Italian—see a Wikipedia page on him). The way he can generate humor with a sort of elegantly snapped-out frankness—because where the clear, elegant emotion is so important, you need less of a dry clatter of words—is like Robert DeNiro playing comedy, as in Analyze This (1999).
Cannavale’s character Delfino is a recent divorcé (or is in the process of divorce?) who habitually goes jogging with Mike in what looks like typical New Jersey watershed land, and—more creatively—eventually arranges to be another coach with Mike and Vig for the New Providence high school wrestling team, once he discovers what Mike shares of what he has discovered online: that Kyle was an ace wrestler back home in Ohio. Delfino can use the distraction of the coaching, given his doldrums arising from the divorce, in which his ex is using his former (?) house, complete with visiting boyfriend (a contractor who had worked for Delfino!) with his trade’s tool belt. In short, Delfino is a man “in transition,” similar to the main characters of The Station Agent.
There are lesser but important characters:
* Melanie Lynskey, an apparent newcomer of an actress, plays Kyle’s mother Cindy, a “druggie” (as Jackie dismisses her in the abstract) who has been in rehab and arrives in New Jersey to take Kyle back and to see if she can take custody of her father Leo (from her own angle, but similarly to Mike, this would be in part for the stipend). She sets into motion, not out of simple malice, and with aid of an attorney, Mike’s being revealed to have misled the judge as to where Leo would live while he was Leo’s guardian (though this is not revealed in court but in negotiations between Mike and Cindy’s attorney, leaving a potential for a sanction to be levied against Mike, while this isn’t actually pursued, because of a pretrial settlement between Mike and Cindy).
* And Shelly, Mike’s legal secretary, in a small role, is played memorably with a suitable mildly brassy accent and pluck to be a good representative of that type of professional in New Jersey.
* A character named Stemmler, a wrestling buddy of Kyle’s (who stinks as a wrestler), is played by an apparent up-and-comer named David Thompson, who provides mainly comic relief.
The elderly Leo, as important as he is inscrutable
This all may look like a fairly mundane sports-centered movie (with family drama about as important), about middle class elders stirred into a kind of rejuvenation by mentoring a young man whose talent is shadowed at first by his seeming mopey and drifting when he first turns up on the steps of his grandfather’s home, as discovered by Mike. But another one of the braided plots of this movie concerns the grandfather, occasioning one last character sketch here, and also orienting the plot of the movie regarding Mike’s ethical twists and turns, which really ground this movie.
Leo Poplar is an elderly man who comes into Mike’s affairs as a client, as Mike practices elder law. Leo is getting “funny” in his old age—he’s in the early stages of dementia—and he needs a guardian. Mike will eventually arrange with the judge, at the hearing reviewing Leo’s competency, to be Leo’s guardian. As I said, there’s a provision for a $1,500 fee stipulated in Leo’s estate to pay whoever is his guardian. Mike, hard up for money as so many real-life small businesspeople in recent years, decides to become entitled to that fee by persuading the judge to let him be the guardian.
Leo is played by Burt Young, a somewhat baby-faced actor whom I’ve seen only in one other movie (not that I am so comprehensive in my movie viewing): Chinatown, in which he plays the balding “Curly,” a man cuckolded by his wife, who it is the business of private investigator J.J. “Jake” Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, to discover evidence on. (Gittes as a P.I. mainly does matrimonial work.) Curly seems merely a device at the start of the movie to orient what Gittes’ business is, but it turns out—in the convoluted world of that 1974 movie—that he serves as a plot device in helping Jake make one last attempt to extricate himself from the legal and local-politics snares increasingly binding him (to leave a plot summary very unfinished). Burt Young’s laconic style and New York City–area accent—he seems like a longshoreman—suited this minor character.
In Win Win, about 40 years older, Young is now greyed and thickened, though still mumbly and modest in comportment. Young viewers might wonder what kind of Pillsbury Doughboy or Michelin Man is this: this big, somewhat muffle-mouthed potato of an old man. But even here, we see that McCarthy’s characters are never cartoons or one-dimensional: Young’s laconic style may make Leo a bit of a cipher as an elder suffering from growing dementia, not quite understanding what goes on in the courtroom and seeming to find joy in little other than a nice bowl of Cocoa Puffs he wangled in an assisted living dining hall.
But Leo is one of those elderly who may seem “not all there” in normal repose, but has a saving wit (flavored with a street-smarts style) kick in if indignation spurs it in him (and he can show heart, too): when, with Kyle at hand, he grumbles about a Black female judge on TV being the one who arranged that he live in an assisted living facility, Kyle is given food for thought that leads him to find, with his birth mother’s later help in a court transcript, that Leo had always wanted to live in his own house.
This becomes the central story development of Mike’s being caught in a deciding ethical dilemma, which brings the plot strands of Mike trying to shore up his family’s finances, and shooting for greater glory—aided by Kyle—with his wrestling team, into a collision with reality that amounts to Mike’s pride going before a fall: he went a little too far in trying to finesse some solutions to his problems. So a compromising set of new decisions is needed—and arrived at.
Giamatti’s Mike as the movie’s troubled—and generous—heart
These character sketches bring to mind three things: I didn’t mean to sum up the movie this way; meanwhile, this is a busy movie in terms of plot, more than I would have thought; and so much of the story devolves from character, as it does (and should) in more-adult movies. But now to Paul Giamatti’s Mike as exhibiting the film’s central ethical question, and carrying the most dramatic heft. And to remarks on the film’s craft, seeing it in the context of McCarthy’s other deceptively low-key films.
Mike is presented not so much as a lawyer in order to make any points about practiced law, whether satirically or otherwise; he is a small businessman with a family, not only a coach of high school sports but something of a recognized figure in town (e.g., chatting with some locals in a Dunkin’ Donuts). He has the life you would think he wanted, and as a lawyer presumably is not the sort to regret this career choice over, say, becoming an actor, a newscaster, or a forest ranger. But his business, thanks to the financial crisis of 2008 and after, is running low on clients. When he has a “panic attack” or the like when jogging on preserve land with his friend Terry Delfino, his admits (as a possible trigger) his financial problems. Mike says he can’t bar-tend; he’s a lawyer, not a “scumbag.” Then Terry remarks that so-and-so is doing well because he focuses on making money, and fully understandably Mike bursts forth with something I like: the cry of a man who has honestly tried to run his business creditably and is still being crapped in the face by the overall economy for it: “No shit, Terry! Thanks for the update!”
This is richly representative drama for today’s middle-aged man—no soaring horseshit here: and it wins me over because it is a lawyer realizing what it means to be a small businessman like any other small businessman—not some pretentious, posturing self-deluder who thinks the world owes him or her a “large living” because he or she went to law school, and who seriously needs a crash course in understanding that average people cannot all be burdened by inordinate legal expenses because, as it happens, it is terrorists, prostitutes, and Mafiosos who seem easily to get legal representation in this country, not small biz-people trying to earn an honest living; and that it would have been nice if he or she, and if all law students, could (though they don’t) participate in AmeriCorps before embarking on their careers, so then they could know what it means to start an honest small business or social service and how hard it is. (Sorry, a little agenda-moment there.)
So we sympathize with Mike, and when he makes the ethically dubious choice to line up a court-sanctioned status as Leo’s guardian, with monthly fee included, yet dishonoring the understanding at court (and Leo’s wishes) to live at home, we are willing to ride with Mike through the rest of the story and see how this pans out.
A very nice touch shows the “flying by the seat of the pants” quality some small businesspeople can get into: as Mike feeds his first check from Leo’s estate into an ATM, he phones his wife to ask her to mail a (supposedly forgotten) health-insurance check. Very good.
Craft of the movie nicely couches the story
The craft of this movie is obvious, as it pretty much is with McCarthy’s previous two movies. With such a quiet movie on the lookout for telling little gestures and so on, careful production is essential. And indeed, McCarthy uses here many of the same team he did on the earlier movies: Oliver Bokelberg for cinematography; Tom McArdle for editing; John Paino for production design; Melissa Toth for costume design; Mary Ramos as musical director (a notable contribution, I think).
Bokelberg’s sensitivity to lighting or color scheme as establishing the mood of a scene (maybe with help from Paino) is seen here as with McCarthy’s two previous movies. For instance, there are two connecting shots in which Mike is grabbing a cigarette break in a monochrome behind-the-building area complete with Dumpster (a scene reminiscent of 1970s “urban realism”)—looking the way any small businessman anonymously would in his killing-time/resting moments: like an average dipshit hanging out in an obscure location, looking like the “waste case” high school students in the smoking area you thought would never have amounted to anything (though some may have ended up running a successful financial services firm).
The musical composer varies with each film; in The Station Agent, Steven Trask, a British musician, provided music that suited the film well, especially as to changes in mood between scenes—an American country-and-western variety, though it made Newfoundland, N.J., seem more like Oklahoma than it really is (which is, not at all). Win Win features a guitar-based soundtrack (by Lyle Workman), which not only makes it roughly similar to The Station Agent in terms of how such music is shaped to mood of scene (and hence means McCarthy is starting to seem as if he projects a certain “brand” of filmmaking, very generally like a Hitchcock with a Bernard Herrmann or a Steven Spielberg with a John Williams). Win Win’s soundtrack also has room for hard-rock segments that are atypical of McCarthy but are suited to the excitement/“coolness” of the sports scenes.
I leave aside comments on the climactic moments of the film, and the denouement, because I’ve probably said a little too much already lest I risk spoiling it for people; but I think familiarity with the complexity of plot and themes is helpful to keep in mind as you view this film and see it as more substantial than it may seem to some who are used to noisier and stupider fare.
The toilet scenes
Numerous shots show Mike’s doing the “small biz-man thing” in being his own repairman. I especially like when he is shown plunging his office’s toilet; I don’t like this simply because it “puts a lawyer in his place” but shows what a do-it-all biz-person can be all about. One quibble: rather than sitting or kneeling before the toilet, it’s better to plunge it standing up, both for leverage and as not to get soiled with the water.
Later, I will entertain an apropos use of toilet imagery when speaking more bloody-mindedly of attorneys: how, when you’re dealing with one who is a real monster, you can picture yourself treating him (figuratively if not literally) like Popeye Doyle in The French Connection going to ludicrously violent extremes in beating up an informant in and outside a pay toilet, in order to protect the informant’s cover. (My metaphor would be in respect of the action, not Popeye’s intention.)
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