Review of Win Win (2011) by Shiira — 07 May 2011

With his team mired in last place, Morris Buttermaker(Walter Matthau), the beer-swilling coach of the most incompetent Little League baseball team imaginable, is not above using desperate measures to improve his players' fortunes.

Buttermaker wants to win, badly, and he knows that the struggling team's chances rests in the hands of his pretty daughter's ability to recruit Kelly Leak(Jackie Earle Haley), so he drives Amanda(Tatum O'Neal) to the arcade where negotiations take place over a competitive game of air hockey.

The girl loses, much to her father's considerable irritation, especially since she has to date the power-hitting righty blessed with speed an a cannon for an arm, as part of the terms of the deal. But despite the apparently fruitless outcome, Kelly, who looks old enough to shave, is still joining the team, exactly what the rough-edged boy wanted all along, haunting the periphery of the ballpark like he did from atop his motorbike on a daily basis.

It's a win-win situation for all three parties involved. Partly because he smokes, Buttermaker expresses a leeriness about Amanda's upcoming social engagement with Kelly, since only punks up to no good smoke, which is why in "Win Win"(a film that bears a passing resemblance to Michael Ritchie's "The Bad News Bears"), Jackie(Amy Ryan), due to concerns over her young daughter's safety, locks the basement door on Kyle(Alex Shaffer), associating the unwelcome guest's nicotine habit with Eminem.

Far from being a pool cleaner, Mike Flaherty(Paul Giamatti) practices the law, but on account of the downward turn in economic growth, clients are hard to come by, a deriving materialization that could put the firm and middle-class lifestyle that his profession provides at risk.

As a sideline gig, Mike oversees a losing high school wrestling team which the filmmaker introduces at the outset of "Win Win" with transient scenes showing the coach's umbrage toward his young student-athletes as a sort of punctuation for everything that's going wrong with the counselor's life.

Every bit as bad as the Bears, the filmmaker gets no comic mileage and levity from the talentless New Providence High wrestlers, whose incompetence, rather than being a consistent source of easy howlers, only serves to exacerbate Mike's already-heightened financial anxieties, for the reason that the lawyer's failure to drum up business through a fresh infusion of new clients is compounded by his failure at coaching a solitary win.

The filmmaker understands that our economy is no laughing matter. On paper, "Win Win" has the makings of an inspirational sports movie, especially during the intervening time when Kyle transforms the Pioneers overnight into a squad other schools have to reckon with, and he himself, an up-and-coming champion seeking redemption.

"Win Win", however, narratively speaking, is much more sophisticated than, for starters, Howard Becker's "Vision Quest", inasmuch as the feel-good genre to a large extent gets installed by the ambitious filmmaker as a McGuffin.

Strapped for cash, Mike commits a potential disbarment-causing breech of ethics, when in his capacity as the legal guardian of a client(Burt Young), he manipulates the dementia-afflicted old man into taking up residence at a nursing home, while pocketing the money with the court's understanding that Leo would be supervised from his own house.

In actuality, "Win Win" is a moral thriller, epitomized by the pointed existence of a faulty boiler whose clanging noises represents the cacophony in the lawyer's tell-tale mind. Just like the furnace, Mike knows that the scam has the potential to blow up his practice in an instant.

How Kyle performs at the wrestling tournament is not the film's climax; it's merely a byproduct of the explosion that occurs when Cindy(Melanie Lynskey), Kyle's mom, steps forward to claim her father's monthly stipend, and finds the bombshell in the court transcript.

It all but subjugates the wrestling subplot to irrelevancy. The film's real and pressing subject is how greed isn't exclusive to just the fabulously wealthy. The deregulation of ethical standards has become a state of mind that encompasses us all, even a nice guy like Mike.

The filmmaker, above all else, makes a salient point about money being a drug, a narcotic that is every bit as potent as the one Kyle's mother went to rehab for. "Win Win" uses this dialectic to witty use.

Comparable to the scene in Ryan Fleck's "Half Nelson"(a wrestling hold, it should be noted) where Dan Dunne(Ryan Gosling) tells his student's uncle, a drug pusher, to back-off from Drey(Shareeka Epps), despite the fact that the teacher himself is a user, Mike encourages Cindy to leave her son alone, even though the corrupt lawyer is in no real moral position to do so.

He makes more errors than the Bears shorstop Tanner Boyle. "Win Win" is not "The Bad News Pioneers"; it's "Mike Flaherty: The Smartest Guy in the Room".